[ open ] gonna keep movin', gonna roll to town

[falcony]

WHO: sam wilson and OPEN
WHAT: various prompts, some closed, some open! (open log for oct/nov)
WHEN: End of October/November
WHERE: cadens, desert around the city, horizon, etc.
WARNINGS: n/a atm but will update

Comments

[falcony]

[ and sam can be comfortable enough with that, he thinks. mutual respect, a level of trust. geralt knows that sam will have his back and sam doesn't have a single doubt about geralt, either. they can keep going on that path. they can keep those things level.

sam is not entirely unused to these scenarios, but it's been years since he was deployed. the in between left him dealing with universal attacks from gods of power rather than just your every day brigand or bandit, so it's possible sam is a little more tense than he needs to be. it's possible that sam needs a second to relax, just so they can stay where they are, so he can actually offer to help geralt pack, keeping one eye out to the dunes and the other on the task at hand.

it means he can see them, as they break over the ridge and down into the small area he and geralt had set up camp. it means he can see all four of them - faces covered, weapons in hand. they move slowly, wary and on edge, but no less direct - they are here for their things, sam reminds himself. just thieves, looking to make a quick buck. but the thing is, that's not the only thing sam sees, because the closer they get the more it becomes obvious that the streaks of dark across their legs, their arms, is blood.

they come to a stop and geralt turns to face them, sam finding himself back behind the witcher and just to the side enough to see around his shoulder. the one in front laughs at geralt's words, eyes turning to the other three. ]

You hear that? They're on their way. [ sam feels an edge to the words that has his hand tightening around the hilt of his practice sword, his other hand slowly edging to where he keeps his knife. ] Leave the horse and your shit, and maybe we'll let you.

[ at those words, sam feels a kind of disappointed breath leave him, knowing just about how well those terms are going to go. because it's not the stuff either of them are worried about, but the horse. sam glances to geralt - then - as if to check what he's thinking. ]

Now! [ the bandit yells, the other three at his sides starting to edge forward again. ]

[gynvael]

[ There are times he misses the natural fear folk hold towards him back home. Few would confront a Witcher over his horse in the middle of nowhere, with not a town to stand behind them but only four of their own. Out here, they assume him just another human.

It is not about the stuff. But there's a difference between being robbed in the city and being robbed a day's ride out into the barren desert, horse and all. These men know that, too. The blood staining their hands tells him they do not care, and he realizes as he takes them in, one has a limp broken doll, stained red, stuffed into a bag slung over a shoulder. His eyes narrow.

He's already made his decision before any of them move. He doesn't look at Sam; in this moment, it matters not what Sam thinks or has ideas of. His instinct has turned to making sure they both return intact. He waits until he senses that shift in the air. His sword appears in his hand in a flash.

Time does not slow so much as the men simply move slow, to him. If he'd been quick before slipping between Sam's swings, he's even quicker now. He ducks a wide arc, pierces right through the soft belly, and rips downward. He's spinning before blood even finishes spilling to the ground, sinking his blade into another's leg before splitting his throat. ]

[falcony]

[ sam considers, briefly, what it might look like if he were to try and talk them all out of this. he's been in tight situations before, knows when to try and step in to take advantage of a chink in their armor, but as the bandits start to move closer and sam surveys the lot of them - catching, perhaps at the same moment, the bloody doll in the bag - he knows there's no talking anyone out of this. there's no avoiding this, either.

his senses aren't as quick as geralt's, this is a fact he has come to realize and started the process of being okay with. no matter what, no matter how, geralt would always be faster, stronger, more aware. thankfully, sam's got years of practice in that sphere, and knows that when someone like that moves, you best follow suit.

the bandits seem to notice just about the same time sam does, and suddenly everything is chaos. geralt is already gone, sam's lost track of him before he even realized he needed to be keeping track, but he doesn't have long to worry because one of the bandits is on him, swinging their club - or sword - or whatever it is hard and fast at sam. he is able to parry a blow, dodge another, and gets one strike in and then another. nothing lethal, especially not with the practice sword, but he hits something hard and hears air rush out and thinks maybe, maybe this won't go too badly.

that is when something hits him, hard, against his left side. he turns towards it just in time to stop what had next been a swing towards his head, but only for a few moments. the bandit in question had been the one talking, the one giving orders, and sam thinks of rumlow. of a collapsing building. the bandit is talking even now, saying something about the small campsite not far from here, the screams, the blood. sam recognizes crazy when he sees it, managing enough air for a -] Man, shut the hell up. [ before, upon realizing his grip on the sword was slipping, diving into the middle of the bandit in question and taking them both into the sand.

he gets a few good hits in, but so does the bandit, and while sam knows he got his dagger out somewhere along the way, the bandit had made a go of it, tangling them both in limbs, sand, punches, and groans. they roll, and sam feels something cut him, but he's not sure if its the bandit or a sharp rock, as all his focus is on the knife. on getting it away. they roll again, and in the movement of it, the bandit gets his hand around a rock - clocking the side of sam's head and catching him off just enough to get the upper hand, ending up leaning over sam, sam's own dagger now held to his throat, puncturing the skin just enough to burn.

the bandit spits, a sharp curl of a grin splitting his face where a black eye has already started to form, blood running from the corner of his mouth. sam struggles, or tries to struggle, but stops when the dagger pushes just a bit further into the skin of his neck. ] Any last words?

[gynvael]

[ Two bodies hit the ground in the space of five seconds; the other two would've followed in another five were he alone. He isn't, though. There's Sam, and Geralt finds his attention split for an instant. (This is exactly why he travels alone.)

The man Sam's sent to the ground is getting to his feet, and doesn't make it before blood is spurting. He's not the one Geralt's got his eyes on—that's for whoever has Sam pinned. He hears struggling, sees the flash of a dagger. He closes the distance in three steps. The blade pierces straight into the back of the bandit's skull and out through his throat. There's a twist as he yanks his sword out, shoving the body aside and kicking the dagger out of reach.

Fuck.

He bends down to offer Sam a hand up. Geralt's got blood on him, but none of it's his. A frown draws his brows together and it's clear all of his concern is for Sam and not the corpses in the sand. As far as he's concerned, they should've walked on by and they hadn't. And he doubts they thought twice before murdering a child. He knows the type; they're not men he cares to spare a second thought for.

(In the back of his mind, though, he realizes he isn't sure how Sam will take it. Not that it should matter.) ]

Are you hurt?

[falcony]

[ sam is hyperfocused on the blade. he's been in similar situations before, sure - on the brink of death, blade or gun to his chest, filing through every possible alternative option. but the truth of it is, in that moment, sam's not really sure what he's going to do. he can't get leverage, he can't disarm him, he can feel himself bleeding pretty heavily, he probably has a concussion, he can feel a kind of fog start to settle in, but if he doesn't do anything soon-

blood, and the tip of a blade. sam doesn't really know what is happening when his eyes focus on that, on the tip of a blade pushing out through his throat and towards sam's. and then there is that cracking, of bone splintering, of the bandits skull breaking apart in two, and the body being shoved off to the side.

the man - not only dead, but nearly torn apart. cut through like meat, ripped apart at the seams and tossed away. there is blood, splattered across sam's face that is not his own, and some that is his own pooling at his elbow, down his sides. he should get to those, he thinks distantly. should tend to those and make sure he doesn't bleed out on this desert floor. but he finds he can't quite focus on that, or on how his head is still swimming, or how every breath shoots pain through his sides. because all he can see is the eyes of that bandit above him, wide with shock, then blank. suddenly, as if panicked, sam's eyes turn to the scene around him. to one, two, three more bodies in various stages of the same. dead, all of them dead, and geralt standing above him, holding out a hand to help him up.

geralt, who killed all four of them in the span of what...three minutes? four? geralt, covered in their blood. geralt, who doesn't seem to even be breathing hard. who doesn't spare any of them a second thought. sam looks at the hand offered, then looks to geralt's face - his own expression one part shocked, one part horrified, one part something else.

( it's not fear, that much is for sure. he's not scared that geralt will hurt him. it doesn't even cross his mind. it's more of the weight of the passing moments, the lack of remorse, the sudden feeling of a quickly growing distance. ) ]

Fine. [ it comes out short, like he had to push it out through his lips. and then sam is turning to his side - aware, that he is not reaching for the hand offered to him. that he is ignoring the help geralt is trying to give him. but sam doesn't even think about what that might seem like to geralt, at the moment just trying to. find his footing in all of this. in the four bodies around them, the stench of them in their air. dead. death.

what if marlo finds out about this?

sam - through the pain of his rib - pushes up to his knees, and then his feet, somewhat unsteady but if geralt tries to reach for him in any way, sam will have a hand out to stop him, quick, definitive. ] Nothing lethal. [ his words aren't slurring, which means his concussion isn't bad. good signs, he reminds himself, breathing quietly through his nose for a few seconds as he wraps a hand around one of the cuts on his arm. he looks around, again, getting a better view of the bodies. of the carnage. sam swallows thickly at the undeniability of it all, and can't do anything about that distance growing further and further between him and geralt, before what just half an hour before he'd been so confident in.

the feeling is a bit like the rocking of a boat in the midst of a storm, not knowing if your feet will hold true, or if you'll trip and fall into the depths of the water below. ] Fuck.

[gynvael]

[ Geralt does not consider himself a man especially affected by how those around feel (tries not to be), but that doesn't mean he's not learned to read another with the sort of acute perception of one who uses it to survive. The tension is sharp, Sam distracted, eyes wide, and he suspects it isn't to do with the bleeding on his head.

He withdraws his hand and does not offer it again.

No. Nothing lethal. Nearly was, though. He delves silently into his saddlebag for the strips of cloth he never leaves without. Were they in the city, he'd be concerned about the attention. They aren't. They're far out, the nearest outpost is on the other end of the desert—and this is where the oustrice nest. They will scavenge the bodies. Roving brigands who kill for supplies and scant bags of coin will be missed by no one. He doesn't like what happened, but he won't waste time on it any further, either.

He pushes the bandages into Sam's hands, since he's not about to stand here waiting for Sam to come around and take them from him. ] Wrap that up. We need to go.

[ He doesn't mean to be cold. He isn't, exactly. There's still a furrow in his brows, as he looks Sam over. Sam's injured and that was too damn close. He's just—not interested in being scrutinized, which Sam has a habit of doing. He is equally uninterested in pushing help on someone when it will only be rejected. It doesn't matter. He can't say he expected much different. (Except he had, a little, in the smallest part of him.) ]

[falcony]

[ normally, sam is more acutely aware if others. usually, sam is more concerned with those others than even himself. be it the concussion or his injuries or whatever else, though, sam doesn’t catch the tension in geralt, or how the he retracts his hand. doesn’t offer it back.

sam pulls himself up, to his feet. he keeps his eyes on the ground under him, to his own hands and limbs, to literally anything else except for the scene around them. there’s a rolling in his gut, but he can’t tell if it’s the concussion or something else. he swallows, to keep it down, to keep his focus anywhere else, and for that reason it makes him jump when geralt hands him the bandages - a tension shooting through him before he notices what it is he’s handing off. what it’s about. ]

Right. [ he doesn’t look at geralt’s face, something keeps him from it, but he does take the strips of fabric, does make as quick a job as he can of wrapping them around his arm and middle, trying his best to keep his hands steady.

his mind is spinning - on the bodies, in what they’re doing here, on the blood. and maybe it’s the sheer difference of it that has sam so unmoored, how just a few minutes before they’d been joking, nearly laughing, and then - this. he doesn’t even know their faces, their names. he’d caught the bloodied doll, he’d heard the comments they’d made. they weren’t anywhere near decent people, maybe, but-

sam’s stomach lurches, but he keeps it down with a final tightening of the bandage with his teeth. pulling himself fully back together - or as much as he’s going to be able to. he feels sick, but he can’t attach it onto one specific thing, but when sam looks up to see where geralt had busied himself, the feeling increases. unsteady, uncertain, unsure. ]

Ready when you are. [ sam gets out, walking over to where geralt had kicked off his dagger. the dagger he couldn’t bring himself to use. ]

[gynvael]

[ He cannot, in all honesty, recall a time when Sam will not look him in the eyes. It's not an unfamiliar thing, though. More than a few find his unnatural gaze unnerving. Perhaps that it's too familiar is what digs under his skin, removes any desire to close the gap between them that he might've held solely by virtue that they're (friends) acquainted. This is not the first time things have changed abruptly, and he knows it won't be the last.

If Sam anticipates he'll try to clean up the bodies in any way, Geralt does not. He does clean his sword, wiping off the blood before he slips it back into its sheathe alongside Roach. She's a hint skittish, stamping nervously. He calms her easily with a gesture, and adjusts the saddle on her back. He keeps one eye on Sam, just in case, but Sam seems to patch himself up all right on his own. Amount of blood doesn't seem too bad. A few sutures and some rest should do. But he can tell from how Sam moves that hopping up on Roach isn't going to be a simple thing, so he hangs back, if Sam needs a boost.

For the most part, he isn't giving any of this much thought. If it bothers him (it does), he sees no reason to linger. He's done more for less, has had far more explosive reactions than a bit of tension, and at least Sam has not fled in the opposite direction. So. Right now, he just wants to get back to the city and wash the blood off. It's beginning to itch where it dries, some of it sticking his hair together. ]