[ Childe has done this enough times that the sound of everything that comes after pulling the trigger hardly phases him any more. It's perhaps less so because the manhadn't begged or pleased for his life, robbing Childe of that particular satisfaction without even realizing it.
He's already turning away when the sound of the vials crushing draw his attention, and while it would be easy to write it off as the man's body smashing them under his weight - the air feels different, somehow. Charged, anticipatory, and it sets all of Childe's nerves alight with some unseen, impending threat.
Rex Lapis is not dead. Despite taking a gunshot wound to the head, he is not dead.
How - he hadn't missed? The barrel had been pressed right up against his throat and Rex had not dodged at the last second, so how -
Childe is already moving, trying to pick out the white-suited man in the darkness, bringing his pistol around to point it at what he can see of the mafia head - but then he's speaking, and that voice is both a warning and a rumble of a promise that makes his knees go weak for all the wrong reasons.
I have to get away, his brain screams at him. Childe has never before run from a fight in his entire life, but his legs are stumbling backwards despite the grip on him, head swimming with the scent of whatever it was he'd just inhaled. His emotions pingpong around so violently it robs him of his breath, the only thing he's aware of the way his blood rushes in his ears, how his heart hammers violently against his chest like a bird beating its wings against a cage, trying to escape.
Perhaps mercifully, he's flung away; his elbows and knees knock on the floor hard, sending pain lancing up through his joints, and even though the room is dark and impossible to see in he can feel his head swimming with the impact and the fumes. He vaguely registers the fact that his weapon had been separated from his hands and gone spinning across the floor somewhere far out of reach.
A lesser man would have wept and pissed himself, surely. Childe - Childe just needs the world to stop spinning. He presses his forehead against the cold ground and draws in deep, ragged breaths, feeling his emotions war and tear at each other in his chest. He's trembling, shaking with the onslaught of sensation. While his body screams at him to move, to run, there's another, deeper primal need to rip and tear and kill, a deep-seated desire he hadn't unearthed since the early days of his being in the Tsaritsa's employ.
But he knows this feeling. It's familiar in the vaguest sense, and it takes all of Childe's efforts piecing his mind back together from where the pieces have drifted apart to place this nostalgia. His fingers curl into his palms hard enough to hurt, knuckles going white under the exertion - and then he's suddenly pushing himself up into a stumbling stand, and then turning, and -
Rex Lapis should have expected this, surely, from the Tsaritsa's youngest Harbinger. Out of all of them he's the most rash, the one with room to grow and mature. He doesn't know where his gun is, but that's fine - he has his fist, which he swings at the mafia head now with all of his strength, the sheer force of it probably enough to break his own hand in the process.
But it'll be worth it if he can at least dislocate the other man's jaw. ]
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He's already turning away when the sound of the vials crushing draw his attention, and while it would be easy to write it off as the man's body smashing them under his weight - the air feels different, somehow. Charged, anticipatory, and it sets all of Childe's nerves alight with some unseen, impending threat.
Rex Lapis is not dead. Despite taking a gunshot wound to the head, he is not dead.
How - he hadn't missed? The barrel had been pressed right up against his throat and Rex had not dodged at the last second, so how -
Childe is already moving, trying to pick out the white-suited man in the darkness, bringing his pistol around to point it at what he can see of the mafia head - but then he's speaking, and that voice is both a warning and a rumble of a promise that makes his knees go weak for all the wrong reasons.
I have to get away, his brain screams at him. Childe has never before run from a fight in his entire life, but his legs are stumbling backwards despite the grip on him, head swimming with the scent of whatever it was he'd just inhaled. His emotions pingpong around so violently it robs him of his breath, the only thing he's aware of the way his blood rushes in his ears, how his heart hammers violently against his chest like a bird beating its wings against a cage, trying to escape.
Perhaps mercifully, he's flung away; his elbows and knees knock on the floor hard, sending pain lancing up through his joints, and even though the room is dark and impossible to see in he can feel his head swimming with the impact and the fumes. He vaguely registers the fact that his weapon had been separated from his hands and gone spinning across the floor somewhere far out of reach.
A lesser man would have wept and pissed himself, surely. Childe - Childe just needs the world to stop spinning. He presses his forehead against the cold ground and draws in deep, ragged breaths, feeling his emotions war and tear at each other in his chest. He's trembling, shaking with the onslaught of sensation. While his body screams at him to move, to run, there's another, deeper primal need to rip and tear and kill, a deep-seated desire he hadn't unearthed since the early days of his being in the Tsaritsa's employ.
But he knows this feeling. It's familiar in the vaguest sense, and it takes all of Childe's efforts piecing his mind back together from where the pieces have drifted apart to place this nostalgia. His fingers curl into his palms hard enough to hurt, knuckles going white under the exertion - and then he's suddenly pushing himself up into a stumbling stand, and then turning, and -
Rex Lapis should have expected this, surely, from the Tsaritsa's youngest Harbinger. Out of all of them he's the most rash, the one with room to grow and mature. He doesn't know where his gun is, but that's fine - he has his fist, which he swings at the mafia head now with all of his strength, the sheer force of it probably enough to break his own hand in the process.
But it'll be worth it if he can at least dislocate the other man's jaw. ]