ArchivedLogs:Waking Up In Nerdhaus

Waking Up In Nerdhaus
Dramatis Personae Hive, Dusk, Billy
In Absentia	2014-06-19 Dusk brings Billy back to his place after he faints.
Location <NYC> {Geekhaus} - Harbor Commons - Lower East Side
The light is fading, outside Geekhaus's enormous windows, twilight-dim where the fading sun plays against the river outside. It's cool in Geekhaus -- no A/C running at the moment now that the sun is setting, but the high ceilings and open windows and large fans whirring by the ceiling make for a pleasant breeze all the same. The huge curved-screen television against the wall is switched on, frozen to a paused screen of Saints Row IV, though just at the moment nobody is actually around to play it, the controller abandoned on a beanbag. Dusk is off in the kitchen, perched on a stool at the counter, still in the same cargo shorts he'd had on earlier, still shirtless -- though now there is gauze bandaging wrapped around his forearm, and more holding together a long tear down one huge wingsail where the thin membrane would otherwise just be flapping open. There are a few other scratches, against his ribs, his hand, though these haven't been deemed significant enough to warrant bandaging. At the moment he's working his way through a bowl of noodle soup that smells kind of curryish and kind of spicy. There's a small glass perched on the counter beside him, half-full with liquid thick-dark that looks very much like blood. Over in the TV area the futon has been unfolded into a proper bed-like mattress, laid out with fresh new green-and-white sheets over its cover, a pillow. The warmth of the day means no blanket, really; Billy's just been loosely draped with one sheet and settled for rest. Way off across the house, out of the TV space, past the kitchen, past the stairs, the coffee table has been spread with scattered papers, notes, a laptop; Hive works just as messily at home as he does out at Montagues. From a lying-down position at the other side of the house he's probably not immediately /noticeable/, off to the side and mostly hidden behind the wall to the bathroom. He's in faded jeans, fraying at their hems, and a brown t-shirt featuring a small cluster of hedgehogs staring at another hedghog who has upended a can of blue paint over itself. At the moment the skinny young man is kneeling on the floor by the coffee table, eyes narrowed down on the drawing he is working on, compass twirling an arc against his paper before he switches it out for a triangle to draw against. He looks -- /marginally/ less scowly here than he had at Montague's. But only marginally. It maybe helps that there are /fewer/ minds crowding in at his own. Billy's hands fall limply across his chest like a corpse's, his head drifting limply to one side. Of course, he's not a corpse ...even though he's pale enough to look like one. Where he lays, at least where flesh meets fabric, the white bleeds out. Eventually, when the little sleeping angel does begin to stir it's just with the slow, batting open of his eyes. He tries to focus, but everything comes to him in globs of color. "Hmmf," he grumbles, squirming his hips and reaching out a hand to gently pad around him to find his glasses. His other arm wraps around his ribs where he was man-handled and he winces as he pushes back on the futon, sitting up. He makes as if to look around the room, but it's clear that he is hopelessly blind. Dusk's thoughts are unfortunately probably loud enough to make up for some of the quiet. A throb of pain from the injuries, a fierce red hunger clawing sharply at his mind that the small helping of blood is more -- /whetting/ than allaying. A jangle of memories, the earlier tussle mingling with longer weeks of sleepless fighting during the height of the plague. The hunger sharpens at the quiet grumble from Billy, eyes snapping over towards the other man with as much sudden focused intensity as the single-minded zombies earlier had had. His wings shift (with another twinge of pain) to avoid tipping over his stool as he slides down off it, scooping up his bowl and his glass and meandering back towards the TV room. He sets the bowl down on a crate, sipping at the glass. "Good. Sleep too much longer I was going to call a medic for you." << Head of the mattress. They're on the floor behind the pillow. >> Hive doesn't actually look up from his work, with this, doesn't move from his place tucked off across the house. His mental voice is a /distinctly/ unpleasant thing, though, not just a disembodied voice speaking in Billy's head but a headachey /stab/ of mental energy that knifes in sharp and painful to the other man's mind. Somewhere beneath the sudden painful jolt, his mental voice sounds much as his speaking one does, middling-low, kind of gruff, a bizarre unplaceable accent that is definitely Not Local but past that is too much a bastardized hybrid of places to easily pinpoint one. It comes (see, helpful!) with a mental image of -- glasses. Sitting up somewhere behind where Billy's head had been. "Ah!" Billy closes his eyes, remaining still for a moment. <<Thanks.>> He thinks aloud. His hand snakes forward and snatches the glasses, as if they were at risk for jumping away and escaping. "Sorry, I'm so stupid," he rubs his side, turning to Dusk after he can see, "Thank you, ~and your boyfriend. For not just leaving me. I'm so stupid." He frowns, jutting forward as if he might reach forward but stopping there, "Are you hurt?" The implications of being hurt by a zombie don't seem to be lost on Billy. "Huh?" Dusk's eyes shine in the low evening light as he looks towards Billy; his head shakes, afterwards. "I don't have a boy -- oh. Shane's not my boyfriend." He switches on a light, now that Billy is awake, though it's on a dimmer switch and he only turns it halfway up. "Eh." His uninjured wing twitches in a shrug, and he settles down to /sit/ on one of the crates near the mattress, dragging his food over closer to it. He takes a moment to settle his wings behind him, though on this low seat they trail on the floor. His eyes drop to the bandage on his arm, head shaking dismissively. "Back in fall I got a few /serious/ chunks taken out of me. This is nothing. How're you feeling? You need a drink or something?" He's sipping again at his /own/ drink. << We do have other shit besides blood to drink. >> There's a faintly amused note to Hive's interjection; this time, it slams into /both/ the other men's minds. << You and Shane are dating now? Does your girlfriend know that? >> He finally abandons his work, grabbing his cane where it sits nearby his table and leaning heavily against it as he makes his way slowly across the house towards the others. "Pff. There's few enough biters left around s'pretty understandable to be caught off guard." Billy prefers dim-to-dark lighting. Bowing his head, he scoots forward and folds his legs under him. <<Seltzer?>> "Uhh-erm, do you have any seltzer?" He makes a pained smile, trying to make as if this telepathy isn't torturing him. He blinks at Dusk, made uncomfortable by his own assumption earlier, but finally not seeming very apologetic about something. "Aren't there like... repercussions?" "For-for the - I mean," he elaborates, clearing his throat and motioning towards Dusk's wing. "I think my girlfriend would be alright with me dating him." Dusk's brows crumple inward at this after this statement, though, uncertainly /assessing/ whether or not it's awkward to date both a high school teacher /and/ one of her students at the same time. He dismisses this thought a moment later with the conclusion: probably no less awkward than dating Shane and his /dads/ at the same time. "-- she's okay with me boning him anyway." He gets up from the crate, ambling back towards the kitchen -- it's /almost/ casual how he detours the longer way so that he can prop a wing lightly beneath Hive's elbow in support until his roommate has found a seat. Almost casual if Hive weren't a /telepath/ and can easily overhear the quiet undercurrent of assessment running beneath Dusk's hungry mind. << looking worse today? >> << still shaky >> << can't keep this up for -- >> He hides his frown, turning away into the kitchen to look in the fridge. "Uhhh. We have raspberry and lime flavour. Not plain. You down with either of those?" He exhales sharply at the thought of repercussions. "I heal fast." Hive leans absently into the supportive spar of Dusk's wing, faintly relieved at the assistance until he sags down to sit on a beanbag, grimacing as he sits on the discarded controller and accidentally unpauses the game. He tugs the controller out from beneath himself, pausing the game once more and setting the control on a /different/ beanbag. "Repercussions is his gorram brain /twinging/ at me all the fucking -- you heal faster when you eat properly, dude, I'm not letting you slack off on that again." The uncertain musing just earns a thin twist of a smile from him. "The biters are fucking harmless. It's the careless /living/ motherfuckers you gotta watch out for." "Whichever flavor you don't want is fine!" Billy watches the roommates' display with a softening expression, reaching unconsciously to take the controller from the beanbag and set it on -- he scans the area -- the crate Dusk had been sitting on. "I guess you've taken out a lot of them?" For all of his time at Xavier's, they couldn't make a warrior out of him, that's for sure. "Whatever, they're Flicker's seltzer anyway." Dusk grabs a small bottle of raspberry seltzer out of the fridge door, pulling out a small pitcher of coffee, too, to pour a cup cold and black. He returns the coffee to the fridge, nudging the door closed with his foot and grabbing a straw from a drawer. He sticks the straw in the coffee before returning to the next room, setting the seltzer down on one of the crates near the futon -- next to his soup -- and then moving to give Hive the coffee. His lips twist up in a small crooked smile at the question, mind flashing to streets clogged with swarms of dead as seen from above, teeth sinking into flesh, a horde of shamblers lit on fire spreading the blaze to nearby houses. Picturing Vector's face, drawn and tired and -- he shoves this image away with a sharp sudden pang that is not /quite/ guilt. "A few, yeah. Kind of spent a -- a while keeping our old building, um. Patrolled. There were a lot of us there and they weren't -- letting us into the shelters." With good reason, admittedly, given the catastrophic mayhem of superpowered /zombies/ after the first couple mutants turned and took out large populations of their safehouses. Hive curls his fingers around the coffee cup gratefully, lowering it to his crooked-up knees where it has a somewhat steadier resting place than only his own shaky hands. The straw is clearly also a blessing; he bows his head to sip through it, a much more successful venture than if he'd had to repeatedly lift the cup back and forth. There's a slight pinching tightness around his eyes at the continued talk of the zombies; his eyes close a moment later and he sucks at his straw in silence. "He's underselling it. Probably can't count how many he -- think half our building would've been dead if he hadn't --" His teeth grind in a slow creak, and he offers Billy a small half-smile. "S'alright not everyone's a badass. To this day /I/ still haven't taken out a single one." Billy grins, "Well, I can't imagine they have like, standard brain activity." He stretches his neck and scritches, 'hmfing' again at the movement of his ribs. He may need to put ice on that, soon. "That's got to be some kind of specialized sort of telepathy, right? I knew a girl who could talk to rabbits, once." He looks off out of the corner of his eye, "She was a ballerina." "Nah I think they sound more like me. Just fucking -- ravenous monsters." Dusk has a crooked sharp-fanged grin on his face as he moves to take his seat again -- now /he/ sits on the control, echoing Hive's earlier grimace. His wings twitch behind him as he rises again, moving the control to sit beside the soup and seltzer and glass of blood on the /other/ crate. He picks up his glass, taking another quick gulp. "Rabbits? Shit. Everyone I know who can talk to animals says they never have anything interesting to say." "I can hear them," Hive answers the others, very quietly. "They don't sound like you at all. They don't sound like anything you want to hear." He exhales sharply, taking another quick pull of his coffee. "I'd take the rabbits, definitely. /People/ rarely have shit-all interesting in their brains. A lot of fretting about dumb shit, a lot of bile, a lot of twisted fucking brain-porn while they daydream. -- Was she any good?" "I don't think it matters if you're good at talking to rabbits or not," Billy smirks, trying not to watch Hive with too much concern. He does start to fret a little about all of the stupid things he frets about that could bother a psychic, but checks himself. ...And then he sees the glass of blood. And all of the things he was thinking about stop. And he stops. ...And just ...stares at the blood. "I think he meant good at ballet." Dusk is now idly daydreaming about incorporating rabbits into a ballet performance. Which switches to daydreaming about sinking his fangs into rabbits. Which switches into daydreaming about sinking his fangs into ballerinas -- oops right what was Hive saying about twisted? His lips curl up briefly, and he takes another slow sip of blood, focusing in on its taste as it rolls over his tongue. His brows lift at Billy's staring. "I'd offer you some," he says with a rather cheerful amusement, "but it's not really to most people's taste." "Yeah. Ballet." Hive snorts, quietly, eyes flicking between Billy and Dusk. "Fff. I gotta get back to work. Want to get /something/ more done before tonight -- hey." He lifts his chin to Dusk. "Don't forget there's a community meeting. 7:30 yeah? No shirt required." He reaches for his cane again, slooowly getting to his feet -- a little of his coffee sloshes out onto his jeans as he stands. "Fffck." His teeth grind again, and he lifts his mug in salute to Billy before starting to shuffle (kind of zombie-like himself!) back across the house towards his work. Billy recovers, wetting his lips, "It would just end up tasting like water, anyway." He takes a swig of seltzer, which soon becomes plain. He smiles thinly to Hive, saluting him with the water. "Sorry, I-uh, don't mean to like, take over your ...living room?" He looks around. Yes. Livingroom. He presses the bottle to his ribs, "You only drink blood?" He asks, after a long pause. Dusk's eye twitches faintly at Billy's apology. He sets the glass of blood back down, shrugging one wing. A long upper thumb-claw flicks out towards the (rapidly growing cold) bowl of soup. "I eat. /And/ I drink blood. Need them both." His brows crease faintly as Billy presses the bottle against his ribs. "Shit. You get hurt? You need like a -- fucking -- ice pack or something? I don't know, some ibuprofen? Hive has some pretty fucking -- heavy-hitting opiods, he never takes what he's prescribed." "/Eat/ it?" "I'll be okay," Billy resettles himself and despite himself, winces again. "I can't really do painkillers, anyway." He smiles to try and reassure the vampire. "'Hive.' That's his name? I'm uh, Billy. By the way. Haha." The blonde inches around on the futon, lounging away from his bruised side. "Or Bleach. I guess." "I eat /food/, dude. See? Look. Noodles. Soup." Dusk picks up the bowl of soup, waggling it briefly closer to Billy. "Yeah. He's Hive. His government name is long as fuck and Americans can't pronounce it. I'm Dusk. Billy's easy enough. So is that just --" He waves a wing slightly towards the bleach-splotched bedsheets. "Like an /always/ thing?" "I mean, they could've been blood noodles or something!" "Yeah, I actually ...used to have really bad allergies before I manifested. Like bubble-boy allergies. So, whenever they're dampened, it's just even worse." Pinching at the white blotch, Billy doesn't look up while talking about himself, "I'm really sorry. I can replace them, if you want me to... They're like, /REAL/ clean now, though." He smiles. "That sounds -- incredibly unappetizing." Dusk stifles a snicker at the thought of blood noodles, moving his bowl into his lap and twirling up another forkful of noodles to slurp them into his mouth. "Huh." He swallows, tongue swiping a drop of soup off the corner of his mouth. "Sounds shitty. So the -- bleachy thing helps?" His mouth crooks up in a smile. "Man, our living room has milk crates for chairs, do we seem like the kind of people who give a fuck about bleach on our /bed/sheets?" "It helps. The whitening is a side effect. I'm kind of like my own purifier, now. Nothing bad can get through," Billy laughs, bulging his eyes, "I don't know WHAT you guys care about and what you don't." Ehem. Silvery blue shirts. He prods at a milk crate with his foot. "So, do you suck people's blood? Like that shark kid's? Or are you like Angel or Spike with that chip in his head?" He twirls a finger at his temple. "Mmnh. Well. That's useful, at least? I knew one kid who was allergic to his own -- uh. His mutation made some kind of strange acidy thing. Some mutations just seem fucking /dumb/. Better when it helps you." Dusk slurps down another forkful of noodles, lifting the bowl once it's emptied of noodles to put it to his lips and drain half the remaining liquid. He chuffs out a quiet laugh, picking up his glass again to gulp the rest of the blood down. "I suck a lot of people's blood. But I ask permission first. Best of both worlds, right? All the, uh, /soul/, none of the constant fucking angst." "You live far? I took you out of Brooklyn. We're just over the bridge. You don't need -- ff. Cab fare or anything do you?" Dusk gets up, too, but only so that he can meander back towards the kitchen to finish gulping down his soup and put the dishes in the sink. "Man, you don't owe me shit. A whole lot more of this town would be dead if people didn't look out for each other with those things. Hey." He leans up against a kitchen counter, glancing over Billy. "You like gaming at all? Uh. Tabletop. Board games. Whatever. We have a thing. Game night. Every Tuesday. Should swing by." Maybe it was the Buffy reference. It is a house of nerds. "I live in Brooklyn," Billy brightens, "But I can manage. I don't need to take your money, too." "Yeah, uh, totally. Maybe." Provided he doesn't have an anxiety attack or something. "Oh, cool! I usually do online things." He motions towards the invisible chemicals in the air around him, "But maybe." He builds up to writing down his number before awkwardly inching out of the house ...and getting completely lost in whatever part of the city this turns out to be.