Logs:Courting Danger
| Courting Danger | |
|---|---|
CN: internalized ablism, mention of suicidal tendencies | |
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia
|
2023-08-14 "I will listen, in as many registers as you need to speak." |
| Location
<XAV> Medical Lab - Xs Basement | |
Gleaming and sterile, the school's medical facility is all cool science in contrast to the mansion's old-world old-fashion. All stainless steel and antiseptic tinge, the room is filled with the quiet whir-click of the various implements that comprise its medical equipment -- all state-of the art. The hospital beds are curtained off for privacy when they have patients, and in one of the alcoves there is a small operating theatre visible. More heavy-duty equipment is visible in the lab in the back, where the securely locked cabinets keep sensitive equipment out of the reach of teenage fingers. The medical lab in the small hours of the morning has been quiet; somewhere across the way there's a teenager with fresh cast and their leg up in suspension, sound asleep; over here the patient in this small back room has been even less lively. The fact that Hive is still fully in a coma has not stopped Ryan's slightly tipsy ranting ever since Joshua dropped him off here a short while ago. Out of consideration for the other slumbering patient, his voice doesn't carry any farther than Hive's little quarters, but that does nothing for the loud-clanging cycling of his mind as it jolts between various and contradictory extremes. He's just spinning down from a state of high-anxiety worry that's been colored thick and heavy with a deep and aching love and, now, with Absolutely None input from the unconscious telepath, is talking his way back into a bright-hot fury. "-- how yuh even been treating that boy of yours, anyway?" This scolding comes with vivid psionic clarification that he isn't sure Hive is getting, isn't sure if he hopes Hive is getting: DJ's hungry mouth on his, the press of his back into Ryan's touch, the storm of reds and oranges and rich purples that danced wild through DJ's desire where it half-drowned Ryan's senses -- the clawing blinding-white jags of desperate need that tore through. "-- I know you been sleeping a minute but that motherfucker felt like ain't nobody touched him in years." << Magic underwear doing its job I guess >> tumbles into, both sharply amused and sharply guilty: << not doing it well enough. >> Somewhere beneath the accusation, somewhere beneath the anger, there's entirely different fury, sick-sharp and self-directed. Maybe if he'd planned better -- maybe if he'd listened better -- maybe if he'd thought through this entire godforsaken decade a little bit better -- "Maybe you got the right of it, everything's gone to fucking shit," he's pivoting again, bitterly, as he slumps forward in his sleek electric chair against Hive's beside. He's dressed still like he was for the abruptly ended foray into Sex Party -- black kilt interspersed with paneling in pink, purple, and blue, a black button down, mostly sheer between the burnout-gingko leaves patterning, a deep pink tank beneath. "Wouldn't blame you if you didn't wake up." This is a patent lie, clear as soon as he's said it. He's already blaming Hive for this absence, though not half so much as he's blaming himself. "He wants to wake up." The voice is terse, with a touch of an English accent--the same one that announced the death toll for the more lethal of the recent raid training simulations--and it's coming from a robotic bee perched in an intricate wirework tree on the table by Hive's bed. With the speaker so crisp and up close, Ryan can distinguish subtle hints that it's a synthesized voice, if a shockingly sophisticated one, but there's absolutely, unambiguously a person behind it. And that person is pretty agitated, just this side of outright hostile and trying not to tip over. They're also terrified. "Because he loves you all, including that boy of his." "What, s'he fucking told you?" Ryan is lifting his head to snap immediately, crankily, even as his mind strains desperate and loud in the mental equivalent of blaring a radio under Hive's window: I'm here, at once fuzzily defined but crystal clear, I need you to be. It's only a moment after this that he blinks, looks around, frowns. He reaches for a flask in the chair beside him, lifting it not for a drink but simply to reassure himself he hasn't yet drained it, isn't that drunk. His eyes focus at a delay on the bee, studying it intently as he compares this voice to B's -- discards this option immediately but then reconsiders it; in his imagination this time the little blue shark has a Union Jack painted across her face and has decided for some reason to prank him. This, too, gets dismissed as he does swig at the flask. "Yeah? Don't usually feel loneliness like that 'cept on the labrats coming outta solitary." Though his tone is still accusation, a swell of fear and worry and love has crashed over him so hard it half feels like his mind might break under the strain of trying to project some of that love to Hive directly. Wake up, is followed swift by he needs you (kind of rudely tinged again with the colorsoundfeel of DJ's hunger, sorry, Hive), followed soon after by we need you and now it's greyer: the long stretch of silence from Jax after what comes next, the washed-out nothingness of his best friend's emotional landscape, Ryan's own stark terror that maybe he shouldn't try too hard in rehab, that once he's well enough on the way to better he'll come home to no Jax at all. "We met?" he's a little self consciously asking the bee. "It's not Hive's fault," the voice insists doggedly, but they're not altogether certain. "But maybe they can -- it's just another reason he has to wake up." There's more fear there, of a different timbre, heavy with the kind of grief that comes of losing too many people and the expectation of losing more. "We've met. I'm the..." It's that other fear again, at once alien in its abrupt modulation and familiar in its existential uncertainty. "Well, I've killed you thirteen times, but I don't suppose that counts." The flippancy is sheer bravado that drops away shortly. "I'm Cerebro." In Ryan's mind the Big Round Room is growing a face, growing a mouth, but the mouth is made up of a swarm of a million robot bees all somehow buzzing with a British accent. He huffs, rubs knuckles against his eyes as if this will clear the buzzing. << the sysadmin? >> he's thinking, but aloud says, "the big brain room?" His eye scrunches up as he thinks back over years of simulated horror, years of sharpening their skills against it. "Rude of you," he's murmuring with a wash of amusement, and then, sincerely: "Thanks." "It's a bloody psionic amplification chamber, and I should not have indulged them calling it by my name." Cerebro sounds annoyed and indignant, while a quieter nostalgia wars with an old, old rage. "But it's...not not me. And I'm also the sysadmin." There's another hesitation. "You're welcome?" This is kind of wondering, almost dazed, as if being thanked was the absolute last thing he expected. "I can hear your thoughts. Some of them. I'm not good at tuning them out anymore. Out here, anyway." He is genuinely not trying to be cryptic, and growing frustrated with it. "Can't imagine how many" << more >> "of us would be dead without those sims." Only Ryan can imagine it, is imagining it, old-old friends so many years gone; the sharp biting sting of debris whipped across his face as Amila goes down in a hail of bullets; Jordana's final screams ringing hard with fear and anguish against his senses clear across the years. To these memories he's adding more, vivid in imagination. A tiny blue sharkpup suffocating in the clear summer air. Sentinels surrounding their van, Joshua's expression frozen waxy and dour forever. Half the facility or half the county taken out in one blazing starburst. A litter of dead labrats strewing the ground in their wake. Hive, still and silent and eerie in the utter lack of psionic ripple around him -- no, that one is real. He curls his hand through the telepath's, rests his forehead against Hive's bony knuckles. "-- used to that." Now he's focusing more thoughtfully on the slow shift of colors that spill across his vision in time with the voice, in time with its vagaries of mood. The grief that's been painted achingly familiar yet each time achingly unique across so very many voices tonight. The rage old but only conditionally tempered by years. The frustration (knee-jerk, reflexive, he's self-examining for what he might be doing to inspire this and then, simply, swallowing another mouthful of Applejack rather than indulge this too long.) -- "Out here? Where y'at, then?" "The Danger Room," Cere blurts this out before the fear of doing so can stop him. "I kind of...am the Danger Room. TL;DR I was dying, weird mutant shit happened, now I'm a literal ghost in the machine." His terror is fading to a kind of dull, comfortable sorrow. There's loneliness there, too, and a kind of distantly embarrassed grief. "The long version is even weirder, and if you're curious you should ask Charles sometime. Get him to show you pictures." The robot bee moves for the first time, turning its tiny insectoid head toward the door. "He's a right wanker and so damnably slow, but he'll come through." Was he speaking metaphorically? A slow flush of psionic warmth fills the room, and a moment later the door opens to admit Charles in a royal blue dressing gown lined and edged in yellow, with a Kinross tartan blanket in his lap and a tray mounted to the armrests of his own sleek motorized chair. His eyes tick over Ryan thoughtfully, then over to Hive. "Cere was fretting." Though his presence is steady and soothing, his voice betrays his own fearful fretting, grief -- not so unlike Cerebro's -- at once old and ever-new, and love that somehow seems to harmonize with his telepathic aura despite coming to Ryan on completely different axes of perception. "But if you did manage to wake Hive, I'm sure he'd forgive you the shouting." "I don't fret," Cere says icily, though he isn't actually very fussed about this indignity. Charles doesn't respond to that, but unclips the tray and sets it down in the empty chair between himself and Ryan. On it are two steaming mugs of hot buttered rum, a bowl of nuts, a plate of crackers and another of neatly sliced apple wedges. There's also a glass of water that somehow gives off the impression it's there on pure wishful thinking, and in the same manner Ryan knows that the libations are made with vegan butter. "I take it you're having a bit of a night." Charles offers Ryan the blanket, his tone mild but the concern behind it somewhat less so. "Youwhat." The mental image of the Danger Room-as-swarm-of-bees returns, but lingers, this time. << the fuck did B do this time >> Ryan is thinking a moment before Cerebro's further sort-of-clarification comes, and now he's thinking in animation, the colorful sci-fi UI characters of Pantheon engaging in wildly improbable stylized digital fighting via their MMO avatars. (Somewhere beneath this, discordant and distant, Cerebro's turn of phrase has stung with an acute pang of memory, Flicker decked out in bright green polo engaged in furious AR-game phone battling that morphs in Ryan's mind into a similar digital avatar battle against a swarm of blue smurfs.) He hasn't quite settled on what to think, when Charles arrives. "What's the story with Cerebro?" he's asking straightaway, gesturing with his flask towards the robotic bee. "We're just meeting. They -- he? -- said you'd spill." Though he's trying hard not to, he's staring at Charles' wheelchair in a way he has never bothered to before -- somehow the realization that he's always just taken it for granted as Part Of Xavier makes him at once envious and angry, curious and terrified. He pulls his eyes away and looks at the tray instead, abruptly choked and abruptly unsure why. "Sorry," he adds as he takes the blanket, as he takes in Charles's dressing gown, "I didn't mean to wake you." Self-conscious, his chaotic spin of background anxiety and rage and grief -- doesn't vanish but quiets, mellowed under the deliberately summoned up strains of Saint-Saëns. Introduction et Rondo capriccioso starts in his mind, psionic white noise, but soon enough has slipped out to play very softly around them, the shift most noticeable in the clear but gentle thread of love that dances through the nimble violin. He put his flask aside, trades it for the rum, which he doesn't yet sip but clutches close in some unconscious and definitely unacknowledged reflection of the way his mind wants to reach for Charles' psionic warmth and instead sinks further into thinking through the fingering of the violin solo. "Was a good memorial. Could only have suited the man better if we blew up a police station at the end of it." His tone has lightened on this; to anyone else the faint trickle of warmth that slips into the audible song might ring true but Charles can feel the dissonant jangle of his sick fury, muted but present beneath. It clangs up against a memory of sirens and the 7D station in flames, of Steve's hands digging hard into already bruised skin that still stings with tear gas, of the velvet-soft brush of Dusk's wing at his back and the heady euphoric pain of his bite, of DJ's scarred skin beneath his hands and the bruises on Lily's neck. His hands tighten on his mug. "They cancelled it!" Cere's angry railing is about Pantheon, of all things. "They're just not going to air the second season. I'm stealing it, obviously." The bee takes off and buzzes over to land on the tray. "But yes, pretty much exactly like that, except it was the godforsaken 1980s and hardware was shit. I mean, mine was brilliant, considering what I had to work with." He is trying not to sound too obviously upset, but isn't very skilled at it and compensates by talking faster. "Also, I had to use Charles's brain in lieu of a proper upload protocol. Transfer speeds on meat brains are dreadful." "He. Cere suffered a terminal neurodegenerative condition," Charles explains, gentle and even, untroubled by the paradox of his grief. "He was, among other things, a powerful and skilled technopath, and he helped us build the Danger Room and Cer --" He sighs, picking up his own mug. "-- the Psionic Amplification Chamber in his final days, in hopes that it would offer him freedom through the use of his telepathy and technopathy." There's an old sorrow and a cold trickle of fear that does not make it into his psionic aura. "The knowledge that his hardware can replicate the powers he possessed in life is surpassingly dangerous, even if in the end that ability was confined to the immediate area of said hardware." "Don't even get me started on RAM back in the day," is evidently all Cere has to add to this, fighting down another wave of loneliness and existential uncertainty. "The point is, we've a bit of experience with weird mutant brain fuckery, and Charles has put Hive back together several times already." Not that this is stopping him fretting (not that he frets). "I'm rather old, and plenty used to waking up in the middle of the night. I could very well have left you to Cere's hospitality and gone back to sleep, in any event." Charles sips at his rum, and though his appreciation of the music is entirely evident without his saying anything at all, he still says, "That is lovely." The attending empathic nuance of his enjoyment weaves as if of its own accord into the conceptual knowledge of the same he's projecting. "I'm glad that the memorial was lovely, as well -- even without any structural fires." His psionic aura strengths subtly, its warmth an unassuming offer of solace. "I don't know if it would help you to talk about -- well, there's quite a lot, isn't there? But you don't have to hold that back." That, evidently, being the feelings Ryan has covered with his music. "I will listen, in as many registers as you need to speak." "They fucking cancelled it!" Cerebro's railing is mirrored in Ryan's emphatic indignance. A moment later he's turning this over in worry (will Cerebro think this is mocking) (should he be indignant) (it was a great show!) -- an acute sense that he can't even begin to understand a life For just a moment he's gone slightly paler; for just a moment his mind is flashing through stark cages and bright operating lights, through calm-cool voices telling only of dispassion and curiosity where they come through a speaker: "Again, Mr. Black.", of tiny brainchips and ugly plastic helmets carrying crude mimicry of Hive's bludgeoning power without Hive's tempering compassion. "Oh," he whispers, and that one breath ripples fear briefly into the quiet music around them; all in an instant and with barely a thought the ache of love that he's been projecting with vehement intention towards Hive has shifted to encompass this crisp nowhere-voice from the intricate little bee. Charles's compliment to the music hits deeper than perhaps it should, cocky as he usually is, as he now is, about his own skill -- a smug << of course it's good >> sits easily with a warm flush of pleasure all the same that the older man has said so. "You up here surrounded by teenagers all the day, I just know you're stewing in angst sunup to --" He tips his eyes up as if he could see the night sky from these basement depths. "'sides, you usually only get to see me at my best." This, bright and amused, is colored with flashes of gruesome horrors; guards who turn his teammates inside out and bodies peppered with bullets, screams and smoke both mingling in the air. "Whooole other ball game from four a.m. me, ask any entertainment journalist." Even so he's wavering -- leaning subtly into the warmth, pulling right back. << Anyway, >> is under this, jealous and warm and angry and grateful all at once, << you probably -- >> Know him better? Love him better? Are hurting more? He's not sure where this thought is going but he's thinking of Hive, impossibly too young to have only been fourteen years ago, how were they all doing this then, his mind raw and bleeding his hurt and fury out of psionic wounds that wouldn't have healed, couldn't have healed, on his own. "I don't know him or love him better." Charles is still speaking aloud, his words calm despite the vast and enduring pain behind them. "I daresay I know him differently, and ought to have done better by him than I did." He closes his eyes, his regret a quiet thing that feels too familiar. "I can't change the past, but I will do everything in my power to help him." He doesn't look to Ryan, doesn't need to -- the sense of his attention is wholly self-evident. "He's not the only one I have failed, and I expect it will be quite a job to learn how to make amends." He does look at Ryan now, and there's a jumbled mess of compassion and guilt and a kind of sympathy -- as resonance, and not pity. "But you are here, and I am quite equal to handling angst." "Oh yes, he's amazing," Cere agrees, waggling the drone's antennae at Hive. "Vast improvement over conventional singular meat brains." Something at the very end of this is pulling him up short. "I guess there are still bugs to work out." He's still trying to sound light and somehow failing even more miserably than before. His distress is momentarily acute enough to transmit through Charles as a kind of alien shimmer in his telepathic aura, keening at a pitch that Ryan cannot quite hear. To judge by his wince, Charles can hear it. What was that he just said about handling angst? << (Cere) >> Then, to Ryan, << He found that -- >> He stops himself and starts again, worried and pained. "He found that comforting." Ryan knows without any need explanation "that" refers to the love he had been blaring, which has reached Cerebro's admittedly abstruse consciousness on more than one wavelength. "I think it is upsetting that he cannot return the favor." There is some reservation here. "Probably he could, telepathically, but he believes and I agree that it's like to be unpleasant." Ryan's eyes close for a moment, and it's not just Hive he's thinking of but Jax, of years of entirely different sort of fracturing and compartmentalizing his psyche over and over, of loving his friends so fiercely and then sending them to war, of being at war so long he may well have forgotten how to do much else, of whether or not he'll be here to make amends to. "Yeah." The anger beneath his words is old and present at once, flickering hot without burning him up. "It will be." He picks up his cup, and pulls in a slow mouthful of the rich hot drink. At that brief shift into mental speech -- and then back -- his eyes dart rapidly to the older man. His breath has quickened faintly, and his appreciation comes with a surge of desire fierce and hot. His sharp inward-turned << fuck >> and << s'goddamn wrong with you >> do little to stem this and for a fleeting and absurd moment he's starting to shift the blanket on his lap but then instead thinking (bitter) (amused) that maybe a spinal injury is a blessing in some contexts. Around them the music is shifting, quiet and seamless; this time the violin composition is original, an intricate multilayered thing whose shimmering dance weaves back over and around itself. "My brain can handle a lot," he's offering with more casual confidence than he feels. It's driven less by any pity and more by a groundswell of yearning that's tangled inextricably with his current emotional turmoil -- he's not sure where compassion for Hive in his ineffable fluctuation of identity ends, where compassion for Cerebro in his alien existence begins; here, now, he's not sure it matters. "Hive in here was horrible, until he wasn't. But how..." He's frowning at the bee, frowning at Hive, frowning up at the ceiling. "-- is there some way to make it easier." Charles frowns. "You have needs. That may be difficult, but I don't think it's wrong." He's sincere but slightly uncertain, here. "Mind you, I'm no psychologist, and likely for the best. In any event, I don't often inspire that kind of reaction these days for any reason, and it is flattering." He's not lying, but there's also a deep sense of loss there, and perhaps realizing that would come across, he adds, "I was married at time I was paralyzed, which was a blessing. It just didn't end well between us." He shakes his head as if to clear it, then takes another sip of his drink as if that would clear it. "I could link your minds together, but I think --" "I'm fine," Cerebro cuts in, so ludicrously unconvincing it's actually funny to him, which is its own kind of relief. "Only. Sometimes it's downright awful to be a ghost." His humor is fading, though not completely gone when he amends, "it's most of the time. You don't need to...be fake Hive, it's just embarrassing." But his longing is so fierce it shimmers noticeably through the ambient psionic warmth again. "Thank you, Cere, that was very tactful," Charles allows, not particularly sarcastic. "I was going to say I think it might be easier to just go to the Danger Room." He's studying Ryan speculatively. "Most telepaths can let you into their minds, but Cere is probably one of the few who can do it quite so literally." There's a sort of anxious hope in his so saying. He gives a small twitch of a smile. "Then you can embarrass yourself trying to eat his brain." "You?" Ryan is starting to say this in pure disbelief; one of the richest men alive, he's thinking, surely people always -- -- and his thoughts come to an abrupt hard check here as he follows this to its logical conclusion, follows it to some of the same conclusions he's been spinning over for weeks. He's thinking of the screaming crowds he faces so often in public and of the hands that grasp at him like he belongs to them, not even lust but ownership; he's thinking of a veritably endless string of would-be hookups, of flirtatious words on lips that echo dissonant in their minds, seeing him as bragging rights or a payday but not a person -- and that was before, with a body other men envied, with all the conventional hallmarks of desirability. He's thinking, too, of the gossip pieces that will inevitably follow when (if) he returns to public life; disgust and pity under a veneer of progressive platitudes, and how this all would translate with Charles' embarrassment of riches. His thoughts shift as he looks up, really looks at Charles, and in the mental space that the man has occupied as Background Aggravation for years he's filling in other details in warm colors and a quiet grounded swell of strings. The visual in his mind somehow encompasses Charles here in his chair beside Ryan but also Charles, soft and warm in psionic presence; it encompasses the school and its generations of students brought in as children afraid of themselves and given space to learn who they are; it encompasses Hive growing from traumatized and traumatizing to a force of rooted-steady power. Smaller and larger at once in his mind, it encompasses the tray beside him and the care it represents. He picks up the water and takes a long swallow. Somewhere here tangled with wry-amused thoughts of his current thirst and the cool drink of water in front of him his desire has only grown, flushing heady and thrilling through the play of his music until abruptly the violin piece stops. << (please) >> keens pleading in his mind and, below that, intently aware Charles can hear, << sorry sorry >> and below that: << (not sorry) >> << just need -- >> Need what, he's trying to work through in a tangle of questions: how did it happen and where were you hurt, weeks of doggedly optimistic charts and explanations from a string of PTs and OTs all earnestly explaining which vertebrae is which and what he'll need to work on to get back on his feet and none of them here, themselves, none of them answering the questions he wants to know. Which paparazzo is going to be the first to catch him with a goddamn diaper on. Will anyone look at him with desire again or only this endless pity. Will it matter if his body doesn't work. "-- Did your," husband? wife? he's making some guesses both directions and then abandoning this question entirely in shame: did they still want you feels like an impertinence even he can't bring himself to ask. Instead he's leaning hard into Cerebro's longing, trying (failing) not to mingle it with his own. "You want my brain, it's yours, but you gotta know it ain't been tidied in there in ages. Haven't been expecting company." "I was a bit of a hedonist in my youth." Charles isn't bragging, but neither does he sound particularly nostalgic. "I was about your age when I was hurt, and most people never saw me the same way after. I do fear it will go worse for you, owing to your fame and infamy." There is a low, simmering anger, long familiar but flaring again on Ryan's behalf. "You can learn to navigate it, I am sure of that. It may get easier as you heal, and will certainly get easier with the right support." His emphasis on "right" is at once mild and very much not. He's visibly startled when Ryan actually drinks the water, and the easing of his worry is sensible in the ambient warmth even before he speaks again. "You needn't apologize. I suspected that I might have relevant experience with at least some of your current troubles." He picks his mug back up. "He still wanted me. I didn't want much of anything for a while but for the pain to stop." Echoes of that hurt flutter through him now, grief and horror and guilt. He swallows, then takes another swallow of his drink. "But in time we figured it out, together." And even through his deep sense of loss, there are echoes of pleasure. Cerebro strains briefly at -- through -- Charles, then eases off. "I can't do what Hive does. But I am absurdly good at --" His drone can't blush, and possibly neither can he in any meaningful way, but his embarrassment is definitely not about being the wrong kind of telepath. "-- a lot of things. It's not all battle simulations in there, you know." "He's seen the program list," Charles points out indulgently. "Though I suppose not your private one. I feel I should caution you..." He considers for a moment, frowning, then changes tack. "You've been through a lot, and there's a lot more to get through. I recommend taking your time, when you're able." There's a sting of rejection, familiar but no less acute for it that in Ryan's mind is underscored by Matt's voice (grown far more derisive each time it's replayed, this past hour) That certainly is a choice. He takes another sip of the water and swallows it slow, breathing out on Charles' mild emphasis and in, again, on his warmth. The sharp hurt doesn't fade; he's only half successful in halting the shamed-angry spiral his thoughts want to race down, but it is joined by a quieter gratitude. For just a moment he answers Charles' grief and loss with a soft warmth of his own; lets that pleasure wash over him without clinging to it. He does close his eyes and take another long gulp of his rum, though. When he opens his eyes again there's a wicked hook of smile on his face, not feigned despite (or maybe because of) the grief and pain and anger still under it. "Private list? Woah, now, I play my cards right I might get the VIP tour? Bespoke danger?" Danger comes with restraints at wrists and teeth scraping skin, here, Cerebro's dapper avatar a welcome replacement for the gunfire and Sentinels he is used to encountering in there. He's unabashed now about the quiet shift in the love he's been futilely trying to summon Hive with; where his mind strains for Cerebro's it's laced heavily now with arousal. He clumsily shifts the chair away from the bed, bumping the stationary bedside chair a few times as he turns it for the door. "I'm only crippled," he tells Charles with an amusement that has already thrown caution to the wind. "Can take my time when I'm good and dead." Charles does not rush Ryan's reflections or try to guide his conclusions. For a moment he just is, and the sense of him is more grounded and grounding in the strength of his love and Ryan's, both. Perhaps somewhere in all of this Charles has given his permission, or perhaps Cere has just grown too eager to stop himself scintillating against Ryan's mind. Though still ghostly, his presence within Charles blazes bright with passion, like embers dancing through the steady warmth. Charles himself does not seem much bothered by the lust washing through him, and when he does blush it's softened with a smile. "Fair enough," he remembers to say aloud, confirming he is in fact unfussed, "as long as it is in your own time." There's plenty of concern there, but something like faith, too. "Have a good time." Cere has not sent the bee drone with Ryan. When the Medlab door closes behind him, an intercom panel in the corridor comes alight with Cere's thrill of desire, his desperation and his fear. His actual voice sounds a little breathless. "If you really want to play cards about it first, or something like, I'm a good sport. But its been a while since I've last done this..." The doors of the Danger Room slide open to reveal a suspiciously plush dungeon extrapolated from Ryan's fantasy. His invitation is a kind of awed, "Please, come in." | |
