Chapter Seventeen
One can derive great strength from anger and rage. Likewise, a pony driven by love is a force to contend with.
"I don't like this," Alana had told him, following him out of the doors of City Hall. "You know I don't like this. Good things don't happen when you go off by yourself."
"Yes," Falcon Wing replied in his mind. "but what else am I supposed to do? How can I turn away now?"
"Do you remember what I said about letting emotions lead your path? About pursuing something blindly without thinking?" she asked.
Falcon Wing stopped descending the stairs and whipped himself around to face her. "I am not blindly pursuing anything. What I'm doing is for the good of this city and that's it. I gave it enough thought. It's going to work out."
His words were awfully ironic in hindsight.
"It's... it's just that I don't want you to get hurt again... or worse. Last time I found you after you went off alone, you were nearly dead. I don't want to see what happens after you go over your limit --" she said, choking up as fresh tears came from her eyes. Falcon Wing winced.
He smiled awkwardly and patted her head with a hoof.
"Not helping!" she snapped, pulling herself back from the hooded pegasus and scowling at him. It was then he realized Alana was angry with him, angry about his tendency to put himself in such impossible situations.He remembered only one other time very long ago when she was angry with him, when he struggled with his inner turmoil. He did not like it when she was angry with him. Not after that incident.
"I'm... sorry. But I have to do this. You know why...!"
"Because you want to do good, or you want closure about what happened to your foster mother?" Alana shot back.
The red colt looked hurt, partly because there was some truth to that remark. He would never know what part Flint and Erasure had in the death of his parents or the ultimate purpose they intended to bring about with their fellow conspirators, but maybe he could piece together what one of them was doing in their last days alive in the Wastes...
"Who said I couldn't do both?" Falcon Wing retorted and then turned away again. This couldn't be their last conversation before his massive undertaking!
"I don't want to lose you!" the caramel mare said, following after him. By now other ponies on the grounds were giving the two passing looks as they went along on their way.
"You already said that!" said Falcon Wing when he reached the bottom of the steps.
"I don't want to lose you, Falcon Wing! I don't want you to get hurt and scarred, mentally or physically! I don't want you to go the way of Steiner!"
Those words made him halt again.
“I hope my absence has allowed her to grow out of it. It wasn’t…healthy,” Falcon recalled the dark blue stallion saying. He wasn't referring to the difference in age between him and Alana... he meant it was literally harmful for her to be around him... and she was deeply affected by the events that burdened him for so long...
"Think like a shadow."
That was Falcon Wing's mantra, slinking into the alleyways he made a point to avoid, his eyes adjusting the the darkness as well as they could. He was no Klaxon, but he would manage.
He was not acting in self defense, he wasn't simply waiting to be pounced on before acting. He was hunting -- hunting what the ponies of Baltimare considered the essence of the night.
He was certain he was more than able to beat it. He was begging for that rivalry now, as short lived as he was determined to make it.
"But would succeeding mean I'm no better than the Shadow Sweep?" a tiny fraction of his own voice asked him at the fringes of his mind gripped by self righteousness.
"What happened to shooting only when left with no alternative? Was spilling Erasure's blood not enough?"
This was different! He assured himself of that. He was going to find a pony whose virtues have gone rotten from the Wasteland's grip on them and put them down before they put him down.
In a way, it was no different than before.
"Kill or be killed," he reminded himself, silencing that momentary distraction and then glancing around the darkened alleyway he was in, aware that his habit of breaking his focus would have presented a perfect opportunity for the Shadow Sweep to make the first move.
But all was still for now. Bags of garbage rested against the walls of the buildings to his flanks. Metal stairs extending up the walls were not being used as a predator's perch. There were no dumpsters -- surprisingly -- for anypony to hide behind. The end of the alleyway was a rusted chain link fence.
The Shadow Sweep wasn't here.
"That's what they would want me to think. That's what I would want others to think if I were in their place,"
His own thought rubbed him the wrong way.
"I don't rely on stealth to kill, though... I would never have to... not after tonight at least."
Falcon Wing forced those distracting thoughts away and readied himself, sprinting towards the wall to his right, jumping at the wall. His hooves collided hard with the surface and he sprung off of it, his landing on the fire escape muffled, his cloak falling over his body.
He made his way up to the roof of the building where he was bathed in the silver shine of the moon.
"I'll dance with Luna on the moon, look at the sun and go blind, but I'll die happy knowing I'm not you, Sweepy!"
He galloped on silent hooves across the roof, peering over the edge at the darkened city. He may be flightless, but that did not stop him from getting a pegasus'-eye view of the streets below.
He leaped across the spaces in between the buildings down the street, peering into the corridors of concrete and brick below as he soared overhead before ultimately coming back down from the air.
He saw no sign of the infamous killer. Was his hunch wrong? Was there really no connection to what occurred in Froggy Bottom Bog? That there was no reason the Shadow Sweep would be after him specifically?
Was he really just a colt shrouded in obscurity running around trying to be a hero, a delusional youngling with a gun in his mouth?
Falcon Wing's eyes glistened in the moonlight. Had he really been scaring himself through the night with a phantom of his own creation? Swept up in the machinations of his own mind?
The red colt sighed, moments away from holstering his gun. He was a fool. A self righteous idiot willing to put himself in harm's way for an end his did not fully grasp. Did he really think it'd be so easy? To keep a monster's attention long enough so that they can be caught when the trap was sprung? A painfully obvious trap?
Did he really believe he could have outsmarted the Shadow Sweep with such a haphazard strategy?
He turned away from the building's edge, accepting his defeat at the hooves... of no one in particular. He was doomed to fail from inception it seemed.
All at once he was dredged up from the depths of his self pity. Standing across from him several buildings away with eyes piercing the night, glowing yellow orbs of almost supernatural quality was a creature. A creature whose utter blackness was accentuated by the moon they stood against.
They were larger than Falcon. Their forelegs ended in talons. Their hind legs were those of a lion. Their wings were half extended, making them look even larger than they were already.
"Dear Celestia..." Falcon thought, utterly bewildered at how utterly naive he had been.
He was expecting his enemy to be another pony, another earthbound pony.
What he got was a gryphon... a pegasus' natural rival in the sky... both staring each other down across the rooftops of Baltimare.
And this gryphon was a ghoul with black charred skin, feathers molted and frayed so that it too should have been flightless as well. But it proved that it was still more than capable of flight when it took to the air and banked below the skyline.
"Because that would have been too ironic!" Falcon Wing snarked, finding himself bolting after what he was sure was the Shadow Sweep...