We Are Bulletproof

"...I was thinking about asking some of the hunters. The trophy hunters. They'd know about any rare supernaturals in the area." Ken's voice was quiet, both hands clasped and elbows resting on the tops of his thighs as he sat leaned forward. He was thinking. About the way Niall clung to him, about the way he couldn't seem to quite kick that alcohol. Another death took its toll on him as it had on all of them. But Niall was fragile in many ways—and tough in others. He withstood a lot of physical torment but the mental ones... those were his Kryptonite.

"I'd have to find them though. That means leaving here for a while. Niall... Someone has to watch him while I'm gone. And I can't..." He sighed and lightly ran a hand over his jaw, a rare sign of perturbation from Ken. "I can't tell him who I'm going to see, or where they are, or anything about them. It's safer for you all to not know about them."

That presented an obvious problem. Niall would ask and Ken didn't want to lie to him. He refused to lie to Niall but not telling him was a lie of omission. Looking up at Jack, he frowned—again breaking that stoic mask he usually wore around everyone but Niall. Ken was willing to do it for Jack and for Brayden, but not at the cost of doing harm to Niall. And he thought maybe Jack understood that, given how precious his own lover was to him. They were all trying to protect somebody.

"If you can promise me that you'll look after Niall..."

"No. No thank you." Ken said stiffly as he scanned Cori one last time. He wanted alcohol and Niall to stay as far apart as humanly possible and would have taken Niall over to the other apartment, if not for the fact that he felt that he should be here in case something happened. Slowly he sat on the edge of the bed to wait with Lieve, who didn't look like he wanted to go anywhere.

"Please don't give any to Niall. He—oh." Cori's hand twitched slightly. Ken grabbed the instrument but the light didn't get closer to them. Hm. He set it back down, frowning. "If Cori isn't a soul weaver," he began, and then stopped abruptly. He was thinking aloud but...

If Cori wasn't a soul weaver... what did they do next?

"Yes..." If Lieve was soul-bound to Cori then he would be a beacon for Cori to find his way back. Ken didn't clarify in case Lieve wasn't; no sense upsetting him any further. He already looked quite agitated, and with good reason.

"Cori is doing what he thinks is right. We have to... trust his judgment. And there's no way for us to pull him back. In fact, it could be dangerous, if he's not ready to return."

They could fracture the soul, leaving Cori stranded in whatever realm he was in, while his body was put on stasis here. That was what happened to Brayden, Ken suspected; his soul was kept intact elsewhere while his body was kept here. A soul weaver would have been able to draw the soul back into the body.

Ken set the instrument down beside Cori. "We have to wait. There's nothing else to do."

The young man who came with Cori was understandably upset. Ken spared him one glance before returning to monitor the instrument. "Keith is a fairy. He couldn't have done it on his own so he must have gotten a soul weaver to help him. There are also spells but they're incredibly hard to pull off. They also destroy the body if they're not successful."

And if he botched the spell, his control over his golem would have been compromised. Which... might have explained how Rip was able to repossess the body. Soul weavers had complete control; their hold over whatever they infused a soul into was unbreakable. Still--impressive that someone had managed to do what only one in... perhaps a million celestials could do. And frightening. How many golems did he go through before he made one that worked?

"I think though... Cori is okay. He's not dead. There's a thread of his soul here tying him to earth, so he can find his way back. Right now he doesn't seem to be trying to come back. Look. Come here, look. See the light on this panel? See how it's pulling away from us, not coming toward us? That means he's moving away from this dimension."

Ken checked both Cori and Brayden for a pulse, startled to find that Cori's was growing weaker by the moment. Then--stronger. Then weaker again. It kept ebbing in and out, as though Cori was here but also not here, fighting to keep a hold over his earthly body and to keep it running. He heard Jack's muttering but he shook his head. "No, don't. We shouldn't do anything without a plan."

Going into this blind was a terrible idea. Ken thought they knew what they were doing--Cori seemed so confident when he walked in. And... admittedly he was more concerned about Niall and how Niall was faring up, and he failed to go through his usual procedure of grilling the newcomers. Damnit.

"A soul weaver..." Ken paused and walked out without explanation, only to return with a small silver instrument. He began to turn it on and to tune the delicate blue dials. "A soul weaver is someone who exists at the boundary of life and death. They can access both worlds, and pull souls from either... dimension." The instrument beeped once. Ken cursed softly under his breath and began tuning it again.

"They call them soul weavers because they can connect souls from the land of the dead to living bodies. As in they weave souls into things--actual bodies, living clay, what-have-you--and they can grow them without that soul's mate. They are extremely powerful and extremely rare. I've not encountered one in my entire life."

So the chances of Cori popping up and being one was... unlikely. Hence. Telling everyone Brayden Smith was dead--because he was virtually doomed. But at the time Ken didn't say anything for obvious reasons. He twisted a dial minutely and the instrument hummed. Ken placed it over Cori's heart, then over Brayden's, then Cori's again.

"He's... His light is here but it's dimming. I don't know where his soul went but it's... not here."

"Yes, yes I know, love. I know." Ken was hunched over in an awkward position comforting Niall but he barely felt it. His thumb gently caressed the swell of Niall's cheekbone as he listened to the half-incoherent mumblings. Death. Lor. The things that Niall never sought help for formed the demons that chased him and no matter how far or how hard he ran, he could never escape. Lorcan's death affected them all but it broke something permanently inside of Niall.

He sat there with Niall in silence, letting his voice trail off as he quieted down and calmed down. Brayden's death hit them all suddenly so it was natural for Niall to... over-react. And Ken hadn't meant to shock him this way, but he needed them to know what happened so that they would be at least prepared. Carrying Brayden's body in through the door to shock everyone wasn't a much better alternative in his opinion.

Gently he kissed the top of Niall's head. "I'm sorry, love," he whispered, so as not to break the silence in the room. Raphael was whispering into Rhys' ear, cozied up with him at the other end of the couch. On the love seat, the young man called Mik was holding Rip and stroking his hair and kissing his temple, letting him grieve.

The silence was only broken by someone calling him--Jack--and he sat up. "Something's wrong." Ken could sense it in the panicked way Jack called his name. He disengaged from Niall and strode quickly into the bedroom, squeezing Jack's shoulder in passing. On the bed, the kid--Cori--was laying beside Brayden and both were terrifyingly still.

"What happened?" Ken didn't touch them as he approached--not without knowing why Cori collapsed. "What did he do?"

Mik, Lieve, Cori, none of those names sounded familiar to Ken so they weren't hunters. Good. Ken finally eased himself onto the armrest to sit, in order to pull Niall closer to his side. They were sort of coupled up—Niall and himself, Rhys and Raphael. That left Rip in the solitary love seat, looking decidedly like the sore thumb sticking out. It was uncanny how much he looked like Jack; his creator was incredibly skilled.

Ken had come into contact with golems before, but only in the context of hunting them down or deactivating their creators to sever the bond. He had never seen one with so much autonomy before. Certainly he never saw one defy its creator, which begged the question—how was Rip helping them now, when his creator wanted to see Brayden Smith dead? And had accomplished that...

He was suspicious, of course. Anyone sane would have been. And while now wasn't the time to voice those concerns, he did glance at Rhys and Raphael, who appeared to know Rip. Later they needed to have a long talk about next steps. He didn't mean resurrecting Brayden, though—he meant assessing the current threat level posed by having Rip amongst them.

But it didn't hurt to have him bring a celestial in... if that was what he was doing.

"Rip, you made friends," Raphael said tearfully, apparently overwhelmed by pride. He wiped a hand over his red eyes—Raphael looked like a rabbit, honestly, with those eyes—and smiled weakly. It was a watery kind of smile but it was a smile nonetheless. "I'm so glad you found nice friends!"

Very gently, despite his mask-like stony expression, Ken eased Niall closer towards himself and away from a highly offended Rhys. Raphael was still clinging to him in silence and... it looked like fighting hard not to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. That level of emotional outburst was not something Ken was accustomed to, even from Niall who could be temperamental on a good day.

He kept one arm around Niall and lightly rubbed his shoulder. Ken wasn't as awkward at comforting people but there were far more important issues at hand than Niall having a breakdown, as difficult as that was for him to have to admit. Niall was his first and only priority but that meant keeping him physically safe first, by getting to the bottom of what happened back at that motel room.

Rip was the obvious white elephant in the room. Ken disliked having to bring him back to the apartment but Rip also had a wealth of information, particularly with regards to Keith. And it was Brayden's last wish to keep him safe with them, which he had to respect.

"...you might have mentioned that earlier," said Ken quietly and disapprovingly. After all that, Rip knew a celestial? A young and powerful one? He looked down at Niall—obviously sloshed—and sighed. Another little shoulder rub, in lieu of more comforting gestures (as there were far too many eyes on them at the moment).

"Where do we find him? I thought they would have all been hunted by now." That was good news for Jack, wasn't it? And for Brayden.

"Sit," said Ken sternly as he deposited Niall onto the couch beside an obviously stricken Raphael and a highly perturbed Rhys. He had left Jack in the other room to take care of Brayden's body, letting him arrange him on the bed and to have a few moments alone to grapple with his grief. And when he came out here, it was bedlam.

"You too," he said to Rip, gesturing to the loveseat nearby. "Sit down. We need to talk about what to do next."

Ken stood beside Niall, his thigh brushing the armrest. He leaned lightly against it but didn't commit to sitting—he had to make sure he was on his toes in case Niall made a run for the liquor cabinet, which he had kicked in when he found it locked. And Ken was not happy about that at all, but he could voice his concerns in private.

"What's going on here? Why have you all decided it was the end of the world?"

Death was nothing new to Ken but when Brayden's body fell against Jack's, lifeless and still, it brought up a swell of emotion inside that he didn't expect. Even he found it hard to keep a stoic expression. He breathed in deeply and blinked once quite hard.

Brayden was the kind of person whose presence didn't stand out much and yet somehow, he got himself noticed. His quiet assurance had a calming effect on people. Ken found him rather pleasant to be around, if only because he was so different from Niall's nervous energy. Sometimes it was nice to have someone else be the calm one, Ken had to admit, even if he wouldn't have traded Niall for anyone or anything in the entire world.

"Let's get him home," he repeated firmly, making no mention of the tears that slid down Jack's face. Ken was not the type to cry easily either and if he did cry, he preferred for it not to be spoken of. So he moved forward to help Jack gather Brayden up, knowing that while it was possible to reconnect the soul to the body, chances of it were not good. It had to be an extremely skilled or an incredibly powerful one to do it, and if there was one around the place, hunters would have gotten to them first.

But he didn't say that. He didn't say much of anything except when he turned his head to look over his shoulder at Jack's doppelgänger. "Can you help us, please? Keep the door open while we carry him out." Brayden indicated that they needed to keep this one safe, so it seemed that they were all going home together in the car.

He's dead

The man who's been after them
Keith
He killed Brayden

Nothing, they'd be good socks, but





Niall
Brayden is


Dead

You can't run before you learn to walk

Socks seem difficult
How about a scarf?

Maybe we can have smaller groups
I admit, waiting for 5 other people to take their turn is... not ideal

Blankets?
Mittens?
What about sweaters?