Description: You know that feeling that you have? A feeling that you really shouldn't upset some people? It's like that. The newly activated Krizalid remembers some things about his previous iteration. Like K's penchant for mucking things up. And he's determined to prove just who between the two is the biggest dog..
If there's one thing that hasn't changed substantially about K', it's his preference for solitude. Though he's become a lot more able to tolerate the company of other human beings, such is still something he is not exactly inclined to seek out. The busy press of Southtown at its busiest moments, in the hours between the end of the work day and the descent of true night, is near-intolerable for him sometimes.
It's at those times that he looks instead for the relative quiet of the park. While it's still rather full of irritating things like cyclists and joggers, these generally ignore K'-- and he ignores them.
Late Wednesday evening finds him still wandering the less-populated park paths, thinking a little bitterly about the 'invite' he had received from Kusanagi two months previous. The furor over the upcoming tournament was reaching a fever pitch, and K' was beginning to think that-- despite his general hatred of organized fighting, and especially of KOF-- entering would be a necessity.
It's kind of like Kyo said, much as K' hates to agree with the Kusanagi scion on, well... anything. NESTS might well be there.
He was not fucking sitting there a second ago.
The bag makes a loud, uncomfortable noise as he removes and unwraps the loaded-up sausage, pretty much immediately discarding the tinfoil. Pearly whites take a big bite. Chicago style hot dog. You can get them at some of the better dog carts around. Onions, cheese, mustard on the bottom, neon relish, sports peppers, celery salt on top. They say there's a particular order it has to be in, but he's never paid attention.
His coat brushes the ground. There is nothing currently hiding Krizalid from K's path, save for the fact that he literally was not sitting there a moment ago when K' passed. All done up in full battlesuit and NESTS regalia--up to and including those gaudy and bleak-looking scarecrow pauldrons--Krizalid's just sitting right there, eating his hot dog with a certain zeal reserved only for starving wolves.
Ah, organ meat...
Now, you want to talk about tournament furor.
Seems like everyone's coming out nowadays, hm? NESTS didn't really ... get (all) of their invitations so much as bleed them out of people who miraculously didn't show up for sign up and weigh in. The knowledge doesn't seem to bother Krizalid much. What gets him rather viscerally annoyed is the fact that there's probably not much stopping K' from breaking out into a full run. Oh wait. There is. If Krizalid's here, you've got to wonder just how many sniper rifles in the dark are allowing him to pull this kind of a stunt.
Not that he needs them.
Krizalid finishes his first bite.
"So, it's _you._" His voice is dripping with enmity. "Sit down."
He's not asking.
Something, a feeling, stops K' when he's only a few feet past the bench. That something manifests into a full-fledged presence about two seconds later, K' feeling his blood suddenly seethe with heat the way it always does when some bloodline passes within his immediate vicinity. Yellow eyes shut briefly, perhaps wondering that exact thing-- how much backup Krizalid might have lurking around this time-- before K' turns slowly around.
His eyes narrow a little on his erstwhile 'brother.' Something very like disgust shows in his gaze--
--but then, K' kind of associates hot dogs with Kyo Kusanagi by now. There's something about them that makes Kyo's obnoxiousness even more pronounced.
Strictly speaking, there isn't much physically stopping K' from disappearing on a shadow and a thought, no. But that's not really how K' operates most of the time, and Krizalid would know that quite well by now. He remains rooted to the spot, glaring at Krizalid with largely undisguised hatred, and emphatically refuses to sit down. He doesn't even move a step towards the bench. He was always kinda disobedient, even back when he still thought he was a clone.
"Yeah. Me," he says. He remains, but he's not -stupid-, exactly-- his senses open up, ready to warn him if anyone so much as tries to drop a proverbial net on his head. "What do you want, Krizalid..."
"--First, a lesson."
He doesn't even have to gesture. The sound of the exiting projectile is barely perceptible--to civilians. NESTS always did have much better in the way of wetwork suppression than even most conventional militaries. But to mutual predators, it's unmistakible. A flash, to the east. The sound of a piece of lead that exits a barrel and accelerates through the grey matter of a 17 year old on an adjacent path, dissolving a face into so much red mist. And then the scream of the friends she was walking to the alley with.
Two more, from a second location, and there is silence.
The entire affair takes only long enough for Krizalid to finish his next bite. People like them eat quickly, don't they? You see, though you could argue there's a familial connection between the executive and the scion, but there's an important difference between Krizalid and Kyo. When Krizalid holds a hot dog, he holds it in deadly talons made of tungsten wire.
"They'll be replaced. Tomorrow morning, they will all suffer heart attacks at the breakfast table with their family. It will be blamed on industrial residues in the cereal. Depending on how I'm feeling, they might have the opportunity to say goodbye." He shares the plan with K' in a sterile, bored tone of voice, as if reading from a script. "But it will be a lie..." he seems to tire of stating the obvious quickly.
"It's not like I even want you back in the fold. I didn't stutter."
He doesn't need to look at the adjacent bench across from him.
"Sit down. Or are we going to have to find out who else is in the park tonight.."
From the waning patience in his voice, there is the idea that if Krizalid has to get up and interrupt his meal, more than lives are going to be at stake.
The sound is unmistakable. K''s expression twitches infinitesimally the first moment the projectile exits the barrel; it doesn't even have to wait for the screams a second later. His face never does quite change, long years of killing and effective amorality having dulled and dampened a lot of K''s responses to such things as wanton murder, but at the same time--
--a lot has changed about him, too. He's not quite as insensible to other humans as he used to be, much as he sometimes wishes he was. He doesn't care to have people die because of him.
His jaw grits until the line of it stands out harshly. He steps forward, stiff-legged like an angry dog, and he slowly sits. His eyes remain fixed on Krizalid, and they don't trouble to disguise their unadulterated disgust and hate. He wants to attack so badly the Kusanagi fire is searing in the veins of his arms, but he KNOWS if he does, another group of people are probably going to suffer accidents.
Why the fuck did he have to start to care if they did?
"If you're done killing little girls," he says, his voice taut with dislike, "maybe now we can get to the point."
Krizalid continues eating.
You see, there is a certain principle in this kind of a situation. If K' actually didn't care to have people killed in his name, then he wouldn't exactly be a rogue, would he? Unfortunately, that's the thing about abandoning an old life, an old career. Once you put in your two weeks, the kid gloves come off. Krizalid has little patience for people who disobey, and for every lazy bite the executive takes, there is a feeling of mutuality between the two. He wants K' to hate him. To attack him. To give him a reason to leave the boy bleeding in the grass on top of all of the bodies he made irritating Krizalid with stupid little things like that. Krizalid can be kind. So kind.
But disobedience is not something Krizalid has... ever... harbored well.
Krizalid gives K' the kind of look that would turn anyone else's veins to ice--the kind of look that isn't destribed in a word, but as a will. He seems relaxed. Self-assured. But not... at all...stable. There is nothing stopping Krizalid from killing absolutely everyone within a square mile and doing exactly as he pleases with what's left over. Except whimsy. Once you're reminded about that much about Krizalid, you'll understand exactly how far pretense will fly with him. Fire... is never far from his claws.
Now that things are going a little more earnestly, Krizalid polishes off the chicago style, taking more time than is needed to prove the point of who exactly he thinks is superior between the two of them, but not so long so as to exhaust his own admittedly short patience. It seems like the paper bag next to him has another food of some kind in it, but Krizalid isn't really facetiously cloying enough to offer K' any hospitality of it.
"Gotta admit," the executive admits, "I... -hate- looking at your face."
He isn't exactly giving K' the same sort of look of unadulterated disgust, but every time he speaks, his words drip with primal bitter. "Every time I see it..." shaking his head, he sucks his teeth, as if suppressing some deeper urge. Given K' and Krizalid's lineage, it seems a dark irony. "But I'm going to put up with you, just this once. I've got some instructions for you...you know the King of Fighters tournament." It's not a question--Krizalid would be honestly surprised if Chizuru didn't go on one knee to get guys like K' involved.
K' sits in complete silence as Krizalid takes his sweet time. He seethes with the lowered-head viciousness of a cobra with its head pinned down. Things have reverted, just a little, between them: as if there were no intervening years at all between now and the time he still served under Krizalid. It's funny how easily you fall back into old habits, once you have to stare an old face in the eyes.
Once you're down there, you find old hate pretty easily too.
He says nothing, partially because he doesn't even trust himself to be able to do -anything- with regard to Krizalid without it transmuting itself between thought and action... winding up as a lunge at the throat rather than civil conversation. He bristles instinctively as Krizalid presumes to give him INSTRUCTIONS-- almost ready to snarl-- but the thought of more bodies stops him.
He bites back a slight feeling of bitterness at the bothersome restraints that a conscience lays. "What about it? It's not like I give a fuck about that shit." This isn't precisely a lie.
There is a reason why it's easy to submit to Krizalid.
There is a concept of surety. An idea that there is a pecking order amongst packs of predators. When you are a born and bred superweapon, a product of an entity that wants nothing more complex than the throats torn out of their enemies, it is simple to live amongst the sheep and become top dog by extension of the fact that you could destroy any one of them at will. Things become much different when the pack returns.
There is a superior here.
No matter how much time has passed. It is not K'.
Krizalid scoffs, derisively. He leans back, reclining nigh-bonelessly over the bench, the ambient sound including the click-clack of his vorpal claws as they worry the iron frame he stretches himself over. "..Whatever. Point is... people like you, interested or not, have a habit of finding your way into these kinds of events. Wouldn't be surprised if someone already tried to put you on a team. Tell you what. Things will be a lot easier on all of us if you went ahead.. and you know. Canceled out that team."
Krizalid takes a long breath, running a claw through his spiked-up silver hair before explaining. "Much as I'd like to rip you to ribbons in front of a camera so we could appropriate it for the weekly training video, I've got more important things to do. See... company's got a lot invested in this thing." He waves that same talon pointedly. "And we don't need kids like you wandering around and messing it up. Business. You'd just be a complication. And you know how we are about those. Right?"
"So!" Krizalid's a little lighter in tone now. "Whatever Kagura put out for you, just think about how much happier you'll be not being there. All the bad things that can happen while you're gone. Take your invitation, tear it up. I'm uninviting you." He shrugs, as if it weren't any serious problem. K' doesn't care, right?
"Besides. If my team keeps it up, I might have to show. And I wouldn't want to humiliate a copy of mine officially. It'd send a poor statement out. You get me?"
K' stares at Krizalid as the NESTS commander lays out his proposal-- no, his order. His expression is blank in that particular way only sociopaths and borderline-sociopaths can manage... a certain absence of emotion not because of any particular self-control, but simply because there is no actual extreme of emotion burning to be expressed.
None except hate, anyway. But that's so everpresent that it's less an emotion and more a natural state. Hatred is buried so deep in K''s bones that it might as well be that pure loathing manufacturing his blood, rather than mere marrow.
Objectively, mechanically, K' is sure all his training must have brought him to a level where he can match Krizalid. But still, no physical strength can truly erase the feeling of always being ranked second best. Of having the only authority figures in your life favor another over you. A younger brother never does quite grow out of inequal treatment, no matter how much time may pass.
He stands up abruptly. "I told you I hated this kind of shit," he says. "Like I would ever show up for it."
He doesn't mention that Kyo approached him. He doesn't mention that he -is- thinking about it. What he does mention is: "So you can be sure if I don't show for it, it's not cause I'm obliging you." And right there, with that, he tries to walk away. He is so close to the point of not caring. Besides, he knows Krizalid's brand of instability. If Krizalid's crazed whim decides against the lives of those around him, nothing K' can do-- or not do-- can save them.
"I'm sure you won't be."
Krizalid doesn't even blink in his prevailing lack of belief in K's words. His response tastes ill, with the faintest cut of facetiousness to the words rolling off his tongue.
Objectively, K' might be able to take Krizalid. The NESTS executive would be a fool to think K' anything other than an unpredictable danger. But Krizalid is the one left behind for a reason. He is the one with a station for a reason. He is the one who is stronger. Of that, he has no doubt. He /is/ the ultimate life. Blind, unwavering belief. Krizalid's own insecurities are myriad, but when it comes to traitors and copies, Krizalid has no use for them except in his private training halls as toys.
He's doing nothing short of daring K' to show.
One predator to another.
"Oh, one last thing."
The executive is still lounging on his perch, perfectly content to let K' leave once his has been said. But this much doesn't require even the slightest indicator of K's attention. "If you see Kula Diamond..." by now Krizalid is calling out after K', "Be sure to give her my regards. I'll be seeing her soon enough, after all--" But midsentence, Krizalid stops short, as if interrupted. Possibly by some radio communication inside his suit. Hrmph. Fine. "We'll stay until I say we go," Krizalid points out to no one in particular, unpacking his other snack in the meanwhile. He still does it loudly.
He's not really paying more than peripheral attention to K' at this point. He's pretty much done talking. It's pretty rare that Krizalid would let anyone just leave like that for any other reason.
By the time K' is out of earshot, Krizalid is rolling his eyes.
"No. Scrub the scene. I want him followed. Take them back to whatever miserable hovel he's staying at tonight. When you get there, wait til morning. Then, consider yourselves free to put them in whatever configuration and combination most interests you in his bed. They're his fault, let him take care of the trash."
That done, Krizalid gets back to eating.
Log created on 21:28:19 12/29/2010 by Krizalid, and last modified on 23:13:34 02/05/2011.