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part two hundred and seventeen
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world cup: exomeme edition: prelims | round one | round two
congratulations team a and team b!
quarter-finals: 07-13 00:00 UTC - 07-15 23:59 UTC
team a - xiuchenlayeol team b - kaibaektaohan
last page | flat view | themes
wc!au: team dage - baccano au 1st prt
(Anonymous) 2014-07-15 09:40 pm (UTC)(link)The Kim family slaughters off some questionable cult, saves the passengers of the new and improved Flying Pussyfoot, and wins at life (Baccano!au)
cw:slight baccano spoilers, language, violence, death (happy ending tho)
theme: animanga, mafia, superpowers, team multiplier!
ft: eventual xiuchen, lay, chanyeol
2555w
(i tried to write this in a way that it can stand alone even w/o viewing source material but it has been difficult. also, non-chronological as per baccano tradition /0\ but i hope the timestamps help ;;)
Re: wc!au: team dage - baccano au 1st prt
(Anonymous) 2014-07-15 09:42 pm (UTC)(link)MOD! team a split for pts!
(Anonymous) 2014-07-15 09:53 pm (UTC)(link)5:06 pm
Chanyeol tries to breathe calmly thru his nose. Inhale. Exhale. Sometimes nerves can get in the way of things. That, plus fear of getting riddled with bullet holes. Yixing-hyung has calmly stuck a chair and some luggage across the door of the conductor’s cabin but the rattling and heavy thumping sounds from behind it is terribly distracting. Chanyeol can taste blood in his mouth. He’s not sure if it’s from biting the inside of his cheek in anxiety or it’s from breathing in the heavy metallic stink in the air. There’s blood on the switchboard, all over the cabin floor, congealing and sticky under his feet, and Chanyeol breathes again. Inhale. Exhale.
Rubs his hands together. Fast. Faster. Nothing but the skin of his palms turning just a bit warm.
“Hyung, I’m out of juice.” He admits in defeat. Yixing turns to look at him, blood in his hands, and blood smudged in the collar of his pressed white shirt. He is laying down what remains of the conductor and the engineer along the narrow floor like they’re in an impromptu funeral service. Stuck a flower in their coat pockets, too. Chanyeol has no idea where the hell Yixing got the flowers.
“Calm down. Try again. If not you could escape up the roof while I hold them here.” Yixing pats the handgun on his hip. Chanyeol knows Yixing only has about 2 or 3 bullets left. The last time he checked there are still a dozen hoodlums waiting to slaughter them on the other side.
“Don’t you have some matches? A lighter? This is the worst possible timing for me to have a slump.” The door thumps again, some huge mass boldly throwing himself against the door on the other side.
“Nope. Grandpa here doesn’t smoke either.” Yixing gestures down at the conductor.
Chanyeol weighs the cherry bombs in his hands, the strongest and the most potent ones he’s got and he can’t even get something to light their fuse with.
“I fucking hate electric trains.” He says.
12:30 pm, earlier
“Do you mind if I borrow this for a bit?” Chanyeol gestures towards the table’s centerpiece – flowers, two candlesticks. One of the girls stares at him, wide-eyed, then she shakes her head at him softly. Chanyeol grins back.
“Look, I’ll show you something. A magic trick.” It’s broad daylight but he can make it work. Chanyeol is one smooth guy, more suave than Minseok with his car-jumping, shoot-between-the-eyes skills. He can do this and not burn down the dinner car’s curtains. He hopes.
The family’s consigliere gets a bad feeling about the Flying Pussyfoot
12:37 pm
“Really?” Chanyeol says, out loud, that it easily reaches the bar where Jongdae’s nursing a drink in between his gloved hands. It’s only half-past noon and if the boss was here he’ll really judge-slash-frown at them for mixing business with pleasure. But Minseok-hyung’s hands are trembling a little, he hasn’t said why, and a bit of whiskey seems like a good enough distraction.
“I love trains too! I ride them all the time for work. And this one’s got such a long history behind it!” Chanyeol continues and the girls titter behind their handkerchiefs.
Jongdae rolls his eyes. “He’s really working hard and he keeps showing off this trick with the candles. He’s going to burn out at this rate.”
“Let him have his fun.” Minseok smiles tightly at him, playing with the empty glass in his hands. The bartender notices and tops him up, and Minseok shakes his head at his offer of getting more ice. When the bartender turns back to cleaning and polishing his wine glasses, Minseok’s glass has already frosted over.
“Hyung, what is it?” Jongdae whispers.
“Just nerves I guess.“
“The guy who threw himself over the hood of a car,” Jongdae begins, counting with his fingers, and Minseok groans. “held on with one hand as it sped along the street, and got a near-perfect shot in between the driver’s eyeballs-“
Minseok ducks his head. “That was one time. Both you and Yixing should stop harping on about it.”
“-gets nervous riding a train. This is amazing. Joonmyun-hyung could tell a more convincing lie.” Their boss is monumentally bad at it so that’s saying something. Jongdae pulls the frosted glass away from Minseok’s hands, fearing it might crack and break into tiny crystalline pieces.
“Trains are ok. It’s just this one. I think it’s a bad idea.” Minseok confesses, snatching back his glass and taking a sip. The whiskey is mostly slush by now, he really must be nervous.
“It’s always a bad idea transporting shipments with civilians.” Jongdae nods.
Minseok puts the glass down. It’s empty. “There’s spilled blood all over this place, Jongdae. In this counter, the floors, the walls and the windows.” Jongdae looks down at the varnished wood by his elbows, sees nothing. “They’ve tried cleaning it out but it has seeped into the wood grain, hardened into window grime. There were a lot of people that had died on this train. I think it’s an omen.”
Jongdae pales. “The Rail Tracer is retired the last time I heard of him. He can’t be coming back here and killing everybody for no reason.”
Minseok calls the attention of the bartender, requests for another refill. At the rate he’s going, there’s a chance that Minseok might actually get slightly tipsy. Just a bit. “Maybe it’s something else this time.” Minseok says.
Kim Minseok may be forced to rework his wait-and-wait strategy
5:30 pm
He gets punched in the mouth, two, three, four times. Minseok spits blood and teeth. He counts what’s left in his mouth with his tongue. He’s just lost five of them. It’s okay. He can grow them back.
He squints with his swollen eye. The man with Minseok’s blood on his knuckles has a bulldog’s face, a mountain man with boulders for fists. A suit-wearing mountain man. He is not a normal thug then. He doesn’t even look particularly religious if he’s from a cult. Of course, of course, it always comes down to politics.
“What is it you Chinese call it? The fucking Triad?” No, because they’re fucking Korean. The man swings his meaty thigh and Minseok tips over violently, collapsing hard on the cold wooden floors. His hands and feet are tied, he’s bound to a chair, and he can glimpse at some underling pointing a gun at the side of his head. He can take them. Ten moves max. Or twenty if the twerp gets his aim right. But Minseok’s always been the type to keep his cards close to his heart until the last possible second.
3:45 pm
“Jongdae, heads up.”
All five of them are armed. They might have looked like nuns coming from a tiny obscure order, with their hooded black robes and masked faces, but Minseok can spot a rifle half-blind, even if it’s hidden under a hundred layers of dark thick clothing.
He pins Jongdae’s gloved hands down on the wooden counter of the bar, glares at Chanyeol who’s starting to twitch in the table he shares with the girls. Yixing he can trust to not come out with guns blazing. Minseok’s a strategist by habit and trade and his strategy has always involved waiting for some sort of balance to tip over.
He makes the mistake of not counting on the twitchiness of the nun/priest things. One of the passengers, a man in his thirties, makes an abrupt movement to reach out for his wife. The shot bleeds him right in the chest and the whole dinner carriage is thrown into chaos.
Yixing catches one in the eye with a throw of a steak knife. Without blinking, Minseok takes out two with shots to the head. Jongdae and Chanyeol jump the remaining ones until one’s half-burnt and the other dead from electrocution. It’s very messy and unorganized and Minseok blames himself for that one civilian death.
Jongdae tries calming down the passengers. In this, Minseok has always liked him best.
“What do we do now, hyung?” Chanyeol says. He is wringing his hands. He’ll probably burn the whole carriage down at this rate.
“Split up.” Chanyeol and Yixing to the front. Him and Jongdae back to the storage carriages where the rest of their guns are, where their crates full of guns and bombs and weapons for trade are lying in wait for some psychos to use.
Minseok hands the nuns’/priests’ guns to the bartender and the wait staff so they can protect themselves, and exits through the other side of the dinner carriage with Jongdae and two pitchers of water.
“Hey, I think you need to breathe, hyung. Once is fine.” Jongdae says.
Inhale. Inhale.
“Breathe out, hyung.”
Release.
“You’ve seen their guns, Jongdae?” Minseok splashes water on the door and holds his hand against it. A solid block of ice. Unless they’ve got a Chanyeol or flamethrowers, no one’s getting through.
“Yeah.” Jongdae takes the pitchers from his hands.
”Some gang must be helping them."
Zhang Yixing, like an avenging angel, systematically shoots at people’s faces
4:40 pm
He and Yixing usually work well enough together without talking. Chanyeol punches the more thuggish looking ones with the foul-smelling shirts and unwashed hair, burning half of their face off with his flaming fists because he‘s feeling a little generous, and leaves the crazy cult members for Yixing to deal with. He feels creeped out by their smart black robes, their cleanliness, their organized ways. The patented psycho stare. Chanyeol swears they imagine using his skull as a soup bowl for their Sunday night gatherings whenever they try to stab his neck.
Chanyeol knees his sixth thug of the day in the nuts before snapping their neck nice and neat, leaving scorch marks on the thug’s neck. He hears a shot going off and a body falling behind him and would’ve been a hundred percent thankful if not for the burning sensation on his left ear.
“Hyung! You clipped me!” Chanyeol clutches at it, feels the steady drip, drip, of blood running down the side of his neck and into his shirt collar. “Come on, I know I have larger ear surface than normal but couldn’t you aim better?” Usually Yixing would apologize at this point, or stare him down until Chanyeol says sorry and complain again in a much more age-appropriate manner. But Yixing looks more spaced-out than usual, like he’s not a hundred percent there, and it nags at Chanyeol.
“Hyung?” Chanyeol goes to him, shaking him by his shoulders. “You okay?”
Yixing’s eyes focus on him, suddenly clear, alive. “I think we have to hurry, Chanyeollie. We have to get to the front car fast.”
11:15 am
Yixing hasn’t noticed he’d been vibrating out of his seat until Minseok settles a hand over the knees of his suit. “Hey, at least wait after the train’s pulled out of the station.”
Jongdae leans over to him. “It’s Yixing-hyung’s first time, right?” It’s not condescending because it’s Jongdae, he’s just curious, and Yixing shakes his head in reply.
“No, I’ve been on trains before.” Tap. Tap. Tapping on the armrest. He looks out of his window and the train is just starting to groan and creak into motion. People in their thick coats and hats are waving their goodbyes from the platform. Yixing waves back. “It’s my first time on a hybrid though. On a diesel electric. I wonder what the switchboards and the brakes look like.”
Chanyeol kicks his foot up on the table between them and brings it back down when he notices that Minseok is giving him a look. “You know what, a train is a train and that means sitting for five hours or more in a metal box with nothing to do.” He yawns. “Trains are boring.” Now that is what Yixing calls condescending.
Minseok sighs. “Give it a minute, Yixing, then maybe the conductors aren’t so busy anymore.”
“Okay.” He gives it five, then stands up from his seat, stretching his legs.
“I’ll be back by lunch.” Yixing waves at them, like he did at the people in the platform a couple of minutes before and takes the long walk up to the conductor’s cabin.
He’s only expecting to maybe have a glimpse or five through the slits on the door just to see what’s changed in the front car (no adjacent carriage with the boiler of course, steam engines are of the past now it seems). But the old conductor kindly lets him inside the cabin, much like a tour guide sharing a treasured secret spot, and shows him the new switches, lets him touch the brakes, explains, answers his questions carefully.
“My dad was a ticket inspector before he kicked the can.” Yixing explains in return, pays back the old man’s stories with a story of his own. “He let me watch the boiler sometimes.”
5:10 pm
The thumping sound against the cabin’s door grows louder. There’s a visible dent in the center, a swell of distorted metal in their direction. Chanyeol’s having his own quarter-life crisis in the corner of the cabin while Yixing frowns down at the old man’s body beside him. The conductor’s face is all scrunched up; he must’ve died while he was in extreme pain.
Yixing bends down and massages the still-warm brow, straightens it out until they lie flat and relaxed like the old man’s dropped off for a bit of a nap. Better.
Chanyeol snaps his fingers again. There’s a spark at his fingertips. “Fuck, yes! Fuck. Okay, let’s do this.”
“Language, Chanyeol.” Yixing says. There are people sleeping.
“Sorry.”
Chanyeol throws the bomb just as the cabin door bursts open. Yixing readies his gun a safe distance away while Chanyeol dives for a better cover. The explosion takes the door off his hinges, takes out two men in front. Ten thugs left. Yixing pulls the trigger while the men try to orient themselves after the blast.
One. Two. Right in the forehead. Three. Knocked out the guy’s front teeth. Four. Five.
Click. Click. Click. Clip empty.
Five left. Yixing ducks down and rolls away just in time to avoid the answering gunfire.
“Chanyeol!”
Chanyeol throws another cherry bomb right in the dead-center of the cluster of men and both him and Yixing escape out of the cabin’s windows and up on the train’s roof. The rush of cold air almost makes them lose their footing.
“Boom.” Chanyeol says just the front car’s trembling comes to a complete standstill. No one follows them up to the roof.
“Great shooting, hyung.” Chanyeol helps Yixing steady his feet.
“Sorry about your ear. How is it?”
Chanyeol’s hand goes up automatically to feel it. His fingers come away clean.
“Huh, must’ve been my mistake then. Sorry .”
“No worries. I think we need to find Minseok-hyung now. They might need our help.” Yixing says.
“Yeah. Hold onto my coat, hyung, or you might fall off.”
Yixing doesn’t grab at Chanyeol’s coat, well, not at first. He tries to stand as straight as possible on a moving train, ramrod straight if you will, and gives a sharp salute to the setting sun. Chanyeol doesn’t make a mean comment about it for once in his life.
tbc