undergrounds | Tell me that I'll figure it out...

Oh, he's riled up Cooper's temper good and plenty. His eyes go hard and flinty, not a trace of light in them. He grips his glass hard enough to make the glass threaten to crack beneath his grasp. "You want t'know the real reason, Eames? I've never much cared for fae. Hell, I downright hate the lot of you. But don't pretend to be so lofty and above it all with that shiny halo of yours. You'd fuck the lot of us right over if the positions had been reversed and don't deny it. I may be a selfish monster, but at least I don't hide it behind a polished veneer like you lot do."

He goes on. "Maybe if you'd ever bothered to look at me like I was something other than something that got scraped off the bottom of your shoe, it might have swayed my mind that there was someone decent amid the whole lot of you. But it doesn't matter." He leans back. "What's done is done."

Wow.

Eames actually laughs at that. Sharp and sudden, switching gears from outraged to amused in an instant. It's not as if he's wrong, Eames would certainly fuck over near enough everyone if it suited his interests, but to do it out of this level of self-pitying bitterness? It's so beyond him it's actually hilarious.

"So... I hurt your feelings, is that it?" Eames shakes his head, apparently intent on playing with fire today. "Christ, I know you look like a teenager, but I'd have hoped someone in your position wouldn't act like one too."

"He was tall?" Everyone is tall when you're four-foot-seven. Cooper is tall as far as Joscelin is concerned. "God's wounds, Cooper, it was two o'clock in the morning off some alleyway. I wasn't looking for distinguishing features."

He feels distinctly uncomfortable sitting here. Asking for help is already completely unlike him; watching the other vampire phoning his contacts like a detective in a bloody television show does very little for his already delicate ego. It makes him even pricklier than usual. "It was the night Millicent died. That's all I remember. Surely, even a fucking saint like yourself has been blood-mad before." It had been his first kill in seventy years. Of course he would have gone a bit overboard with it.

"Okay!" He waves the hand away, very nearly wasting his next question on why are you purple?

That can come later. For now, he sticks with, "So why's your face all weird?"

And there goes the glass, shattered in Cooper's grasp. He wonders how many teeth he could knock out of Eames' pretty face before he got cursed into next week. Three, he's thinking. Maybe four.

He's just getting more and more riled up. Cooper's temper has gotten him in trouble before, but he's just charging ahead, damn the consequences. "Why'd you really ask me here, Eames? Was it for the good of the fae? Because all I'm seeing right now is a petty, self-centered little man who's upset things aren't going his way for the first time in a long while."

Cooper pushes at a muscle throbbing in his eyes. "Joscelin, you are not being helpful." Next thing he was going to tell him is that he had an epidermis and was breathing.

Cooper's eyes narrow as he once again fantasizes about tossing the little nuisance down an elevator shaft. No, he's promised to help, and he needs to make amends for his screw-up. "Let's compare who's the bigger monster later. I'm trying t'help you solve a problem right now."

He gets back on the phone. "He says he was tall. Maybe. I know, but work with me here. There has to be something you've heard." He listens for a few minutes. "Uh-huh. Thanks. You've pointed us in the right direction." He hangs up and turns to Joss. "According t'Diego, who heard it from a meta human in Daybreak, there's a witch who apparently has been lookin' for the person who killed her brother months ago. He was out dog-walkin' when he met a most unfortunate end."

"I asked you here because I wanted to understand what it is that makes a man who claimed to want to change things for the better support a woman who sends her people out there with cages."

The anger is back, remembering Samantha coming into his territory to capture his people, but it's not in his manner. Gestures and voice perfectly conversational, even as he considers how many hardwood bullets it'd take to put this little man down.

He could argue with Cooper, but frankly he doesn't actually care about this poor attempt at insulting him. Eames just sighs, bored, and takes a sip of his drink. A million things flit through his head that he could say to needle him — from jabs about his capability to the incredibly trite pointing out that Nancy is so impossibly wrong about what a good person she thinks Cooper is — but he decides against it. Just waits to see if he's going to lash out again.

In some ways, he thinks the lack of engagement might get to Cooper more.

Talking about what he considers his true face actually gets the ghost talking far more than he would normally. His sentences come slowly, and judging by their structure, he sounds like someone who's forgotten how to speak entirely right. "Got it on one of my first hunts. Witch had fae stalker. Saved her from him. She enchanted it so it would always move. Wanted a face I could stand to look at in the mirror." That's not to say Rorschach is ugly underneath there. He just has a lot of issues. Scratch that, it's Issues with a capital I.

This ghost definitely has Issues... but then again, isn't that the point of being a ghost?

He nods slowly in understanding, although he looks a little troubled. There's a brief silence, and then, "Can you..." Oh god, here it comes. He can't stop it. "Can you even see yourself in a mirror now?" Once again, Ghoul goes right for the important questions.

"You could have guessed my motivations from the start. Seems like you brought me all the way out here just because you wanted to sit there all smug-like while I lost my temper." He sweeps the shattered glass onto the floor and goes to the bar to get a new one, giving him mind time to cool down.

He's fizzled back down to a temperature that won't fry an egg on his head by the time he returns. He trying to figure Eames out. He just sits there, lofty and aloof like he's above it all. "So what do you want t'be done? You won't convince the Night Council to change their position on your own. Half of 'em were for it to begin with."

Rorschach's head tilts the other way curiously. Seriously? That's what he wanted to waste his time asking questions about? This kid wasn't so much a human being as a lop-eared pup in human form. It wasn't endearing in the slightest.

"Only when I manifest." Which had been harder than it seemed for the ghost. He'd gone years unable to even do that much and nearly driven himself insane trying to reconnect with the living world. If he hadn't found Hillingdon, he might have even let the Men with Sticks take him.

"Manifest? Ain't that what you're doin' right now?" Ghoul wrinkles his nose up and reaches out, poking a finger through Rorschach's chest. Ghosts are mysterious things. He's never actually gotten to speak with one, of course he wants to figure out how they work!

Lord help him if he ever mentions the Men with Sticks. That'll really blow Ghoul's mind.

Of course he had an epidermis and was breathing, Cooper. Now you're just being insulting.

Joscelin shrugs. "I let the dog go." He's not that horrible. He quite likes dogs, though he wouldn't have one himself and has eaten a fair few of them on hungry nights.

He can't help but glare as Cooper goes back to talking to Diego like he doesn't even exist. In a perfect world he would be grateful to Cooper for helping him with his problem, but this isn't a perfect world and he's an ungrateful little shit. "The poor man," he replies insincerely. "Odd that his bitch of a sister didn't just try to kill me if she wanted revenge. Why waste the energy on a curse?"

"Stop that." He swats ineffectually at Ghoul's finger, of course going right through like mist in the air. Sure, he could do it all he wanted to other people, but he was dead. It was different.

"And that's five." Five questions, he means.

"Oh, you let the dog go. Do you want a gold star?" Cooper sits back down on the couch, putting his feet up so that Joss is forced down to the other end. Yes, he is a mature adult vampire, why do you ask?

He does look seriously as he mulls over what they've learned. "Well, if it was me, I'd want the punishment t'fit the crime. You killed someone who couldn't fight back, so she put you into the same state of bein' helpless and vulnerable for a few days. It could have been a helluva lot worse if Nancy 'n then Cesare hadn't found you."

The useless swat only makes him laugh. He does pull his hand back eventually, though. "Five what?" Give him a second. "Oh! Yeah, so?" No fair, he didn't know there was a limit. Whatever. He'll ask more regardless, but not before being polite. Ish. "What, you wanna swap or somethin'?"

Ghoul can't really think of anything he'd be worth asking, but if Rorschach wants to play speed-dating, fine. He doesn't have much else to do right now.

Rorschach scowls at the laugh beneath the mask and it responds, the blots forming a shape clustered around roughly where his mouth is. "No. Just not used to it." Talking, he means.

Usually it's because he doesn't have anyone to talk to. No one in Hillingdon House ever asks him anything even when he does manifest. They all just sort of take him for granted by now. Just the strange ghost who's become part of the furniture.

Ghoul squints his eyes and leans in just a fraction, watching the odd blobs appear and fade on his mask. God, that's weird. Sometimes they kind of look like expressions and he's not entirely sure if that's intentional or not.

"Yeah, I can kinda tell," he says as he straightens back up. "You're an asshole sometimes." And Ghoul is such a gentle, sensitive creature...

"And you don't say much, so it seems like you're outta practice. How long've you been a ghost?"

The mask is magic. It's always done its own thing, but Rorschach had been quick to notice that it tended to change more quickly when his mood switches. It wasn't supposed to react that way, but he'd never fully asked the witch who gave it him exactly all the details of what she'd enchanted it with.

Rorschach shrugs. Ghouls was a rude little bugger, wasn't he? But he'd been far worse in life.

The question makes him pause. He has to think hard, going back through the years. "1985."

"Shit," he breathes. He'd already been dead for a good while before Ghoul was even born... Sure, some ghosts have probably been around for a hundred years or whatever, but 30-something isn't anything to dismiss.

Seems like it could be pretty cool. Aside from the dead thing, that's a bunch of years just floating wherever you want, whenever you want. Seeing all sorts of shit. Causing mischief. Ghoul thinks he could maybe be a decent ghost, if he had to.

"That, uh. That kinda sucks. But you're old enough that you can do all kinds of badass ghost shit, right?" Pfffft.

If Ghoul had mentioned his thoughts on how "cool" it was to be a ghost, Rorschach would have done his utter best to smack the dumb pup upside the head. He'd been stuck in this state for years on end. It had been the most frustrating and boring experience of his unlife.

"Not so much." He'd never had an anchor that would have allowed him to gain abilities. If he was able to use telekinesis and affect the world around him like other ghosts, you can bet he wouldn't be wandering around London like some lost spirit. He'd be back out there trying to help the hunters do what they did best.

"I'm aware of that," Joscelin sighs, wrinkling his nose at suddenly having smelly Irish feet shoved in his face. He scoots further away from Cooper. "How can I not be? Frankly I'm surprised only one person died while I was loose on the city. I had significantly less control the first time around, when I was actually turned." He'd killed more than thirty people then. "I am grateful to both Nancy and Cesare for the assistance they provided." And he means that sincerely. It could have gone so much worse.

Cooper's serious mood continues as he thinks back to waking up in a crypt back in 1798. His eyes are far away as he remembers waking up, the rope marks from his hanging still around his neck. "You 'n me both. Never a picnic when you're newly turned." Cooper hadn't even had a sire to help him through it. Scared and confused, the young teenager had been every inch the monster all the legends and myths made vampires out to be. Those early years were all a blur of blood and death.

He looks down the couch to Joss in surprise. "I think that's the first time I've ever heard you say you were grateful t'anyone."

Joscelin's also far away. He'd woken in a mass grave, three bodies on top of him. He had died with his eyes open, not so delirious from pain and fever to not understand what was happening to him. He remembered taking his last breath in the dreamy way one remembers falling asleep. And then he was awake again. And hungry.

He looks up at Cooper. "I don't see why you're so surprised," he shrugs. "I haven't lived this long by not giving credit where credit's due."

Cooper comes back to the present moment, tearing himself away from two-hundred year old memories. He'd come a long ways from that moment, a young, frightened vampire whose first meal had been a gravedigger in the graveyard. Older if not precisely wiser.

"You're usually, I dunno, so sardonic. I rarely hear anythin' genuine like that from you."

Tell me that I'll figure it out...

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