ArchivedLogs:Next Time, Lasers

Next Time, Lasers
Dramatis Personae Jax, Steve
In Absentia	2017-04-23 "You could punch things right here."
Location <NYC> Harbor Commons - Rooftop - Lower East Side
An open-air escape especially popular with smokers and fliers, the Common House rooftop makes good use of its limited space. The railing that circles it has child-resistant gates where walkways can be extended to connect to the other buildings in the development. A colorful and ever-changing table with sometimes-matching benches provides an ideal spot for an urban picnic. There are two garden boxes on the south-facing side, one for vegetables and the other for herbs and flowers, a tool shed and small patio table with chairs between them. It's late afternoon of a glorious, cool spring day. Songbirds flit about freshly leaf'd branches, flowers bloom in sprays of riotous color, and residents and visitors alike lounge around in the grass and on the benches. Up above the courtyard, Steve is staring off at the river, his sketch pad cradled in the crook of one elbow, the page blank. He's wearing a gray t-shirt featuring an adorable Golden Retriever puppy with a Captain American shield collar tag trotting through a strange, futuristic landscape of silver skyscrapers, well-fitted blue jeans, and scuffed black combat boots. He twirls a pencil restlessly in one hand. Jax's sketchpad is not blank. There's a half-finished sketch on it of Wonder Woman in battle, her whip wrapped around President Simon's neck. His teeth wiggle at his lip ring, eyes fixed on the page as he works. He's dressed in black skinny jeans, chunky black and red sneakers, a red t-shirt reading 'All my heroes have FBI files' around a screenprint of a monkey wrench. When he eventually looks up at Steve's pencil twirling, a faint frown creases his brows. Quietly, he slides a thermos and a tupperware container of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies over across the patio table toward the other man. The scrape of the thermos across the table draws Steve's attention back abruptly. The pencil snaps in his hand and he looks down at its two halves as though they had betrayed him. Then back up at the offered snacks. Puts down the broken pencil and takes a cookie instead. "Gracias," he murmurs, putting the sketchbook down and taking up the thermos. Takes a big bite from the cookie and studies Jax's progress. "I like her stance." "Gracias. The person commissioning it has been unhappy every step of the way so I'm hoping this time is the winner." Jax's nose crinkles up, his eye flicking from one half of pencil to the other. Then Steve's blank page. "Yours is very avant-garde. The broken pencil really drives home the emptiness of the piece." Steve blushes, washing his bite of cookie down with a big gulp of tea. "Oh! Well, I'm trying to capture the spirit of the times. Glad to see it's working. And..." He studies the broken pencil. "...I might be a little tense. Maybe I should get in a workout before dinner." "The funny part is if you wanted to put it in a museum people would totally go for it." Jax sets his own pencil down atop his sketchpad, leaning forward to prop his chin in his palm. "Just a /little/ tense? Nihilistic art /and/ you want to go punch things." "You really think so? Maybe I should look into making this a career, after all." Steve nudges one half of the pencil so that it lies at a jaunty angle to the other. "The nihilistic art is incidental to my lack of inspiration, and I /always/ want to punch things." "Point." Jax's pierced brows lift, fingers sliding sideways to half-cover his lips. "Are you serious? If you ever wanted to sell probably anything you've ever touched let alone actual artwork you made I think you would have zero problem finding a market." When his hand drops there's a half-smile on his face. "You could punch things right here. What's on your mind, anyway?" "I can start with selling this pencil that I personally broke." Steve finishes the rest of his cookie in two big bites. "Oh gosh, this is good." Then, a beat later. "The cookie, not this --" Gesturing at the pencil. "--profound symbol of my existential angst." He takes a generous swig of tea and rises, a faint light of excitement in his pale blue eyes. "I'd love to punch you, if you would oblige me. It's...just work stuff." "Angst cookies don't sound like a great flavour." Jax can't help a chuckle as he stands, too. "Well y'all so polite how could I say no? Think I've owed you a match a long time now anyhow." His shoulders roll in a lazy sort of stretch, head cocking at Steve. "Work being more terrible than usual?" Steve grins eagerly, rolling his muscular shoulders in a long, slow stretch and bouncing up onto the balls of his feet a few times. "Hand-to-hand, then? I was about to offer to go easy on you, but then I remembered how that turned out with Matt." His blush deepens. "If you want to use your powers defensively, I...will probably still pull punches if only to avoid breaking my own bones, but no lasers, por favor." He settles into an easy, familiar fighting stance, hands up and curled into loose fists. "Oh, not /more/ than usual, no. They just like to remind me how terrible they are every once in a while, lest I forget. En garde!" The warning is immediately followed by a lightning quick left jab. Even without the full force of Steve's strength behind it, the blow would smart quite a lot if it connected, and probably knock down or at least knock back most opponents not braced for it. "Well. I definitely ain't no Matt. I can only aspire t'that kinda -- woah!" Jax's breath huffs out of him; his body turns, rolling with Steve's jab, though he stumbles back with the force of it regardless. "No fried Steve for dinner, got it." His hands are balled into fists, now, his weight rocking up onto the toes of his platform sneakers. He circles a few paces, keeping Steve to his right side before darting closer for a solid jab-cross. "You aspire to making me punch myself in the face?" This is more bemused than incredulous. Steve feints a dodge, but actually just stands and takes the punch, returning one lower, aimed at Jax's side, as he steps forward to force the other man back. "You can fry me some other time. Or /try,/ at any rate." "-- to that kinda /style/!" There's a glimmer of laughter in Jax's voice with this. He doesn't shift, this time; now prepared, this time Steve's fist connects with a solid and faintly warm wall layered just beneath Jax's t-shirt. Jax steps slightly to one side when Steve steps forward, catching at the other man's wrist and his leg swiping in to try and unbalance him. "An' usually when I'm toastin' you it's your fault /entire/." "I can't help that I have accumulated so many toast-worthy deeds." Steve follows through and /allows/ Jax to unbalance him, throwing himself into an effortless standing somersault and coming down with his free arm swinging, an unusually fast right hook. "I warn't exactly complaining 'bout you gettin' me --" This cuts off into a low grunt. Jax's jaw clenches, and even though Steve's punch connects with a solid barrier again he flinches, sucks in a quick breath. He counters the hook with an elbow jabbed inward as Steve comes at him. "Well, in /that/ case, I take full credit for making you toast me." Steve turns just far enough that Jax's elbow connects with his ribs and not his solar plexus. "Though I can appreciate the right sort of complaining, too." He swivels and aims a sharp, low kick to the back of his opponent's knee. Jax buckles at the kick, knee folding to drop him to the rooftop in a crouch. His hand reaches to splay down against the ground, and as it touches down to brace him he promptly vanishes. There's a quiet scraping of his sneakers against the roof, then nothing. Another moment later, a ring of Jacksons surrounds Steve, each dropped back into fighting stance. The moment Jax vanishes, Steve takes a long step back and cants his head, listening intently. When his opponent reappears in spades, he lapses into a slightly crooked smile. "As if /one/ of you weren't hot enough?" He turns in a slow circle, not closing his eyes but defocussing them, looking past the ring of Jaxes. Dropping low, he sweeps a leg through the space occupied by several of them, though he doesn't seem to be aiming for any specific one. Steve's leg sweeps through two of the figures, thunks up against a hard barrier when he reaches the leg of a third. /This/ Jax is abruptly moving, heel slamming in toward the inside of Steve's knee -- though one of the /other/ Jaxes is closing in to aim a knee toward Steve's back and a third one driving a kick square for Steve's chest. Steve shifts his weight when his leg encounters resistance and throws himself into a forward roll in an effort to flank the first Jax to break rank and attack him. Jax #1's kick connects, though with the side of Steve's thigh rather than the back of his knee. Jaxes #2 and #3 also get their hits in, though not quite precisely they were aiming. The momentum of the knee that connects with his back propels Steve farther than he had meant to go, and he's only close enough to Jax #1 when he rises to aim an uppercut at the illusionist's (or the illusion's) chin. The uppercut meets another hard wall. Beside where Steve just hit, a bright cartoon-bubble appears, in odd 2-D rendering with the word "POW" written in bright red text. The illusion-Jax explodes in a brilliant shower of glowing sparkling confetti, scattering around Steve and the rooftop and the other pseudo-Jaxes in vivid technicolor glitter just as Jax #2 -- low to the ground, now -- slides in closer again to sweep hard at Steve's instep. The cartoon speech bubble does not seem to put Steve off, but his eyes go wide-wide when the Jax he hits disintegrates into confetti. It's hard to say whether it's the shock that throws him off, but Jax #2's next attack does manage to take one of his feet out from under him. He staggers and kicks out at the real Jax without having fully recovered his balance. The real Jax is looking a bit paler, a little bit less steady, after this bout of illusions (now fading away). He sidesteps, though at a little bit of delay; Steve's kick connects (with a cartoon 'BLAM!'), sending him staggering off-balance himself. He is quick enough to recover, at least, stepping back in with a right hook. Fast as Steve may be, he still hasn't gotten his center of gravity sorted, and though Jax's punch does not land utterly solid, it actually does knock him over. He executes a somewhat clumsy backflip so as to land on his feet and not sprawling face-up across the roof. The maneuver was clearly somewhat desperate, but unlike Jax, he comes out of it little worse for wear in terms of stamina. His right fist darts out, a quick jab at real!Jax's midsection. 'BIFF!', says the spiky cartoon speech bubble this time, popping into the air as Jax staggers back against the roof's guardrail. It takes him a moment, an uneven breath, to collect himself before pushing off from the railing toward Steve. Weight shifting lower, he turns his shoulder towards the other man to ram him in a body check. Just about the same time as this, a slim barely visible but very solid strip of glimmering forcefield-barrier materializes, just behind Steve's ankles. Though he probably could've just moved out of the way, Steve braces for the tackle. He shifts one foot back to accommodate the impact, and shifting his weight that foot brings his other knee up into Jax's gut. Or, at least, that was probably his plan. What actually happens is that the foot he slides back stop short at the barrier and he simultaneously takes his weight off the foot that had been solidly planted. As the full force of Jax's charge hits him, Steve topples unceremoniously backwards, grabbing at his opponent to drag him along. Jax goes down along with Steve, crumpling into a pale and sweaty heap atop the larger man. A pale and sweaty heap that is promptly jabbing an elbow at Steve's solar plexus before making a kind of exhausted attempt to scrabble back to his feet. The fall knocked most of the air out of Steve's lungs, and the elbow to his solar plexus expels the rest in a soft 'oof'. He's somehow not any slower for all this. In rapid succession he lifts a hand to pin Jax's forearm to his chest, preventing the other man from rising, and, scissoring his legs, flips them both over in an almost lazy-looking movement. This nevertheless brings his not inconsiderable weight down on top of his opponent, his free hand grasping for Jax's with somewhat less precision than usual. Perhaps he /is/ slowing down a bit. Once pinned, Jax's struggling becomes considerably more futile. Not that it stops him, for a moment, hips twisting and hand jerking against Steve's stronger grip. His head lifts, teeth chomping toward the other man for just a moment before he breaks into a grin. His smile transforms, briefly, into a mouthful of serrated shark teeth. "It's way more effective for my kids," he laments. Steve lean back very slightly, though it does not take very much for him to avoid the snapping. "Had I not declared lasers off-limits, you wouldn't need to bite me." A self-conscious grin. "/Probably/ would not have ended up in this position to begin with." Quite unnecessarily, he shifts a bit more of his weight onto Jax and pitches his voice low. "Do you yield?" Jax's breath catches at the shift in weight, his eye widening faintly. "Well. When you ask like /that/." His head lifts again -- though no snapping this time. Just his mouth pressing gently to Steve's. Steve releases one of Jax's wrists -- the more uncomfortable pinned one -- and cups the back of the other man's head as he leans into the kiss. When he pulls away he is more breathless than he had been at any point during the fight. "I do /so/ enjoy winning," he murmurs with a soft puff of laughter, "but perhaps /next/ time...lasers."