ArchivedLogs:Stars

Stars
Dramatis Personae Hive, Jackson, Jim
In Absentia	2014-02-19 '
Location <NYC> Pandemonium Games - Lower East Side
Two floors of geekery, Pandemonium Games in the Lower East Side is, at first blush, a bookstore rather than a gaming store, small and cozy with aisles dedicated to sci-fi and fantasy books. The glass counter opposite the bookshelves, admittedly, does hold a wealth of cards from various collectible card games, though binders of Magic cards predominate. Bins of dice in a wide variety of colours stand at one end of the counter. It is the lower level of the store that is usually the busy one, though. The stairs leading down to the basement head first into shelves and shelves of games; board games, RPG sourcebooks, Warhammer figurines, battle mats. Beyond the shelves of goods, a much larger room is mostly bare save its many wide tables, filled at all hours with people playing tabletop games of all kinds. It's mid-afternoon, and despite the name of the store it's quiet at Pandemonium. Upstairs there is one young woman browsing the books, and a teenager leaning against the counter engaged in some fervent debate with the cashier on duty, but here in the lower level of the store it's nearly deserted in the hours before eveningtime will find it filled to the brim with gaming once more. Just the rattling of dice in a cup, shake-shake-shake; Hive scoops out a few to roll them out on the table in front of him. They come up green: Brain, brain, brain. He's dressed, today, in an old Xavier's sweatshirt of Flicker's, sized for Flicker's broader-muscled shoulders and too big on his bone-thin frame. His coat hangs on the back of the chair he's slumped into, legs stretched out beneath the table and his eyes fixed down on the Zombie Dice canister in his thin fingers. His backpack lies flopped against the chair at his side, his soft fleecey Theta Tau cap pulled down low over his head. He stares at the empty chair across from him, starting to kick it out with one toe long before there's any other /physical/ presence in the basement with him. Which is perhaps to be expected, to a telepath Jax's mental presence is every bit as ridiculously /bright/ as his physical presence is visibly; he can be heard coming mentally probably long before he can be /heard/ coming. Mind flitting rapid-quick from one task to the next, artwork to grade, the tattoo appointmentments he has later that afternoon, the drawings he needs to finish before class, the paintings he'll move on to now that Zombie's is nearly done (/so/ many portraits to ask for, so little time!); supplies to gather for an upcoming registration protest, a training session to run for a few other X-Men tomorrow morning. All of it too-loud in colour, too-bright in hue. He's still bright when he trots down the stairs, tall knee-high black boots over sky-blue skinny jeans, silver jacket over brightly-coloured mismatched armwarmers, purple-blue-green striped hoodie, tight long-sleeved black-and-silver shirt with a green shirt proclaiming 'let's switch gender roles!'. His large sunglasses hide most of the shimmery makeup over his eyes, though his lips still glimmer and the chrome-green on his nails is bright. He has a thermos in one hand, a Luna Bar in the other, chomping into the bar hungrily as he takes the seat Hive's already kicked out. He setting his bulky FreakAngels messenger bag down to lean against the chair as he drops into it. "... your dice got brains on." He's leaning forward to PEER at them, baffled. Not far behind, Jim's mind by contrast is perpetually going through a rainy BROWN period of general doom, gloom and /nosiness/ that focuses on the opposite of his own personal business. He's too busy minding other people's - straining an ear to catch a few words of the debate going on at the counter, making a reflexive mark on what section of the store the lone young woman is browsing. Marking exits and windows. It's such a reflexive habit he's barely really thinking about it himself. It's all just a dull fuck-you roar. He tromps down the stairs in the same tatty tweed and increasingly fraying slacks he's been wearing for days, hands crammed in his pockets, which almost kills him when he nearly misses the last stair and barely gets free in time to catch the rail god DAMMIT. Then he's trucking the rest of the way across the room, soccer-kicks a milk crate likely left down here /to/ serve as a seat, towards the table. And drops into it. "Everything Hive's got fucking brains in it. Empty his pockets, they'll come splattering out." Apparently no one bothers saying 'hi' today. Well, except the absent hand Jim extends towards Jax, compressing his lips. Just a little... hey. There. You. Hive sweeps out a hand to scoop all his dice back into the canister, shoulders tightening up as Jax comes in closer and a slow grit grinding his teeth hard together. "They're zombies. Or you're a zombie you have to. Collect. The -- the. The." He scrunches his eyes together, shaking his head and fishing one of the dice out of the container, setting it down to the green brains side. "Fuck you my brains aren't -- splattering -- out." His hand lifts to press against his head, then drops back down to swipe the die back into its container. "Ready to start building. The first -- two. Fucking. Houses. Plans anyway. Still waiting on -- some. Some. Bullshit. City. Goverment." Jax reaches out, dipping a hand into the container to scoop out a trio of the dice for himself, turning them over on a palm to examine them. Then dropping one into Jim's outstretched hand. "Brains and a /feet/," he says. And frowns. "What's the red side it looks explodey." He rolls his remaining two dice onto the table. Feet-feet. They shimmer from yellow to blue to purple, and then start to glimmer in scintillating twinkle-sparkle before the dice burst into cool green flames. His teeth sink against his lip at the mention of splattering brains, nose wrinkling up; he pokes a finger into the flames, nudging one of his dice from foot-side to brain-side. "I like your brains right in your head. You collect brains? This /does/ sound like your kinda game. Is this like you projectin'?" His brows raise up from behind his colourfully-rimmed sunglasses to promptly vanish again behind his colourfully-fringed hair. "Oh! Ohgosh. /Really/? That's excitin' news. Well not about the permits still that's tedious but -- gosh. Jus' so many little steps towards -- eee." He reaches through the flames on the table to squeeze Hive's hand. "S'fast," hard to tell if Jim is complaining, impressed or bored, just by his tone. Except that telepaths CHEAT and it's none of the above - he has a deep dark pit that's churning ever onward ripping things apart to study their significancies (<< /is/ that fast? been nearly a month. he feel like he's gotta rush, or just had a lot a time on his hands- >>. That doesn't mean he has no room for his own crotchety variety of JimExcitement at the prospect of getting a new apartment. He rolls his dice like he's mad at it, seemingly /aiming/ at Jax's. Like dice-curling. Into the fire YOU GO. "What'd the colors mean. I want green." Jax. Make them all green. "The feet're like what - you're running the fuck away?" "Had Bastian's magic -- fucking." Hive is outlining the shape of a house in 3-D over the table with his hands, until Jax commandeers one of them. "Makes it /so/ goddamn much faster, doing what I do. Holy shit. Though I have -- had a crapton of. Time. Also. I've got one fucking client and shitall else." He flicks his spare hand curiously at the flames as the die rolls, watching it tumble-turn and then settle, red-explosion-side up, into the green flames. "Sorta yeah. You roll three dice at a time to play. Green gets you points, those are brains. Want to collect as many brains as you can on each turn. Feet are your /prey/ running away from you, those don't count for anything. The red are shotgun blasts. That means your quarry just hit you. So you roll three at a time -- three feet means you /have/ to reroll. Keep any brains or bullets you take. Three shotguns and you're dead, turn's over and you lose any brains you got that round. You can draw new dice from the cup and keep rerolling three at a time long as you want, but any time you get hit three times you'll lose -- all your brains. Any feet you get, you have to keep /that/ dice and reroll it with -- new dice from the cup if you decide to roll again. It -- uh. It matters because there's different odds on different dice. Some have more brains, some have more shotguns. When you run out of dice or you feel like you're collecting too many bullets or you're satisfied with your brain count, you can stop rolling, score how many brains you collected, pass the cup to the next. Person." He flicks his finger against Jim's exploded-die. "Not off to a good start there dude." He slumps down further. Faceplanting into the flames, right over all three dice. Clapping a hand down on the SHOTGUN. "-- Jegus. You hear about Romania." The red shotgun blast turns green, glitters as well. The flames shift to a cool blue, then purple, their edges misting into a faint silver. Around Hive's /head/. Jackson shudders, flames more just /fiery/-red crackling in his mind. "Kinda wish I hadn't heard. I saw footage." He upends the entire cup onto the table, turning over one die and then another to study their varying proportions. Some even red-yellow-green. Some with three red and one green. Some with three green and one red. "They all got two yellow." Though the die in his hand is silver, now, with peacock-blue markings on all sides. "Maybe I /want/ to get shot," Jim growls, grubbing around the table until he's able to paw three more dice into his vicinity. "Fuck Romania. Bunch of drooling backwater firebugs. -- This city's god damn lucky Jackie's the most woefully /honest/ mother fuckers on the planet, he could cheat at dice so fucking easy." Or cards. Or make a lotto ticket look like the real deal. God dammit, Jim, stop thinking like a petty crook. In his pocket, his phone chimes with an arriving text. He ignores it, casting his dice. "Aren't you kind of fucking. Been-there-done-that with getting goddamn shot?" Hive lifts his head through the flames, scooping all the remaining dice back into their cup after Jim's taken three. "S'getting to be a fucking habit around here." He swipes the silver die out of Jax's hand, too, dropping it in with the rest and then slumping back down. His eyes screw up tight at the chime of Jim's phone. "You getting that?" He opens one eye just a crack to peek at Jim's -- brain, brain, feet. And drops the cup back onto the table, lid loosely rested on top of it for easier shaking. "I wouldn't tell if Jax wanted to go fucking rogue. Could use some easy cash." "Getting shot is a pretty common hobby around here." Jax curls a leg up underneath himself, toying with the zipper at the side of his tall boot. He rests his elbow on the table, cupping his hand against the side of his face; his glasses reflect the table in them. The dancing flames, the rolling dice, the swipe of Hive's bony fingers. "I just cheat at /life/. But games are serious. -- Honey-honey, do you need --" He trails off uncertainly, as Hive's eyes screw up. His other hand reaches to curl around his thermos, nails tapping against its side. "You just look really terrible. I have ibuprofen." He /always/ has ibuprofen. Maybe he just hasn't been shot /right/ yet << -shut up, jimmy. >> Reaching over to reroll his feetie dice into the miniature inferno Jax provides, Jim's other hand crams itself in his pocket to turn the ringer off, "Nope." It is almost with guilt, but mostly fuck-you. Focusing on just how appropriately lurksome it is to huddle in a silent basement and shoot dice. Even if all the colors and the zombie references kind of ruin the sketchiness. A BIT. "Though if we're going whole-hog corrupt could just as easily hand over a dollar-fucking-bill at any store and make it look like a god damn fifty." He is /eyeballing/ Hive when Jax speaks. Mouth compressed. Hive clamps down a hand on the dice, stopping it from rolling. "Newp. Always gotta roll three at a time. You take two new ones and reroll this one with them if you want to roll more." He slides the cup towards Jim. "Take the new ones without looking at 'em. Though you're allowed to look into the cup at any time before you decide if you want to roll again to see which dice are still left. Just gotta shake it up again before you pick. This basement isn't even proper-sketchy, man, we're surrounded by Warhammer figurines and -- fff." He gestures behind himself to the shelved rows of board games towering over his head. "You want sketchy as fuck you should check out the poker games that run in Baohaus's back room. Hard to get in there, though. -- Oh /man/ Jax why /don't/ you --" His eyes narrow at the offer of ibuprofen. Instead he reaches out to nab Jax's thermos, swiping it to open its cap, sniff at it SUSPICIOUSLY and then take a swig because fuck it, it's probably at least /caffeine/. "I need like five before it's even a fucking. Dent. Look, I --" His teeth grind again. He looks down at the table. Gulps from Jax's thermos again. "Ffffk." There's coffee in the thermos, black but typically over-sweetened, it /is/ Jax's coffee, after all. The fire spreads out, curling in a glittering dance of silver and blue and purple to form a wider ring on the table. Like an /arena/ for the dice to battle in. "Can you take five? Does that do bad things to your stomach?" Jax frowns, stooping to tear open a velcro'd flap of his bag and pull out an ibuprofen bottle with a quiet rattle of pills. He sets them down on the table, palm still resting on the lid and his brows lifting in silent questioning at Hive's aborted statement. << Please -- >> It's quiet and even Jax doesn't really know where he intends that /please/ to go, aching-worried and not sure /where/ to direct the worry, fierce and formless. The fire on the table sharpens at its edges, /too/ defined in a way real fire shouldn't be. Animated-fire, colder and harder than before in its well-defined lines. It can't really be said it's /obedient/, but after the typical, precariously AGGRESSIVE dead-stare at Hive while he explains the game's god damn rules, Jim fishes out his dice appropriately. And casts them with a wrist-flick into Jax's wicked fairy ring like he's adding ingredients to a witch's cauldron. He isn't even actually paying attention to it, it's just a solid place to form some semblance of normalcy and momentum. Keeping his face, his shoulders loose and generally set at disrespectful angles, most of his concentration is set on staying inwardly simple, solid and firmly grounded as a presence in the room. Against the /throb/ in the living heartwood at his center. Hive trails his fingers through the silvery faerie-fire, watching it shift and dance with a slow exhale that would, if it were real fire, stir the flames heavily in front of him. He doesn't pay the dice much attention except to shiver at the rattling noise they make against the table, /glower/ at them when they finally come to a stop (shotgun-brain-feet), return his eyes to watching the fire. Eventually he sweeps out a hand, nabbing the pill bottle from beneath Jax's palm. He pops the cap open, shaking out four of the pills into his palm and washing them down with a swallow of coffee. "Jegus it's like fucking coffee /syrup/ you're drinking. Goddamn you." He turns the bottle and its cap back over to Jackson separately, rubbing both hands up beneath his cap, pushing the fleece up higher on his head against bony knuckles, fingertips rasping against the stubble beneath. "I don't -- don't really. Know how to do this shit. You should --" He slouches back further in his seat, teeth grinding again. "You stole /my/ coffee, dude, what did you /expect/." Jax chuffs out a /snort/, head shaking quickly. He pulls his knee up towards his chest, fingers raking up into his hair. He drags the bottle back over with his other hand, setting it down in front of himself so that he can re-cap it one-handed. "I don't think anyone's scorin' you, sweetheart. Or that you're even on any kinda -- schedule with any of this. You jus' -- find words when you can find 'em. An' we're here when you need -- whatever you need." Not /exactly/ abruptly, but Jim falls into a low, growly exhale at - all of it. This fucking charade. And just abandons the board all together. In the ethereal light of the fairy fire, something curling harder inside, he leans towards Hive and reaches out a low-hung hand. Not much for meaningful expressions, wordless, dumpy, he seeks to hook a slow, careful thumb beneath the end of Hive's hat. To raise it up. Hive's hand clamps down, sharp and reflexive-hard, pinning the soft edge of his hat against the side of his head. His jaw tightens hard enough to twitch-jump a muscle starkly up through his temple, breath coming out in a sharp exhale. He drops his hand abruptly, drops his /head/ abruptly, slumping hard down forward in an angry-irritable thud against the table, a quick collapse of motion that renders any slow-carefulness of touch effectively pointless. His arms fold on the table, head thudding down against them with a sharp /jerk/ of motion that leaves his fleece cap behind to dangle on Jim's hooked thumb. Beneath, his head has started to grow back a very faint prickling of dark stubble, just a light dusting of shadow over scalp; it does nothing to hide the ropy scars that curl around his ears and down to taper off against the base of his skull. There's a fresher mark, small and neat and stapled back together with two silver staples gleaming metalling against the top-back of his head. "Fuck you, asshole," he grumbles against his arms, shoulders tightening as he buries his face down into them. "S'goddamn cold without hair." Jackson exhales shakily. The fire shudders, in time with his breath. His sunglasses reflect mostly the stubbled top of Hive's head, buried against his arms, for a long moment as his fingers just toy with the childproof cap of the headache pills, twisting it to one side with a clicking ratchet of noise. The legs of his chair scrape against the floor as he pulls it closer to the table, leans into the fire and across to curl his palms gently against the top of Hive's head, long fingers wrapping slowly downwards to lie against the knotted old scars. The fresh staples, he doesn't touch. His skin is fiercely warm as it ever is, and growing a few degrees warmer with a very faint glow blossoming within his palms, fingertips tracing their heat lightly against stubble and scars alike. "So don't go rolling in /snowbanks/, dumbass" Jim mutters back through gritted teeth. His hard eyes aren't blinking, fixed on the bristly ( << spiny >> ) curve of Hive's skull. He moves the hat to his other hand and, almost simultaneously with Jax, his own hand rests down over the back of Hive's neck. As though the two of them could together could hide him. Their combined touch is as radically different as a voice, a fingerprint, a strand of DNA; his fingers blunt and knuckly, the texture of his palm flakyrough. Nowhere near as warm, nowhere near as delicate, but steady. Heavy. And taking an equal care, as thumb takes turns with Jackson's touch, to avoid the staples when it runs a heavier course over the snarl of old scarring. But he's looking intently at the staples all the same. Taking it in, detail for detail, as though he's trying to /memorize/ it. "You get the results back yet?" Keeping a business-flat tone has never been a struggle for him. It just kind of drops out disembodied somewhere beyond Hive's hidden face like a mud clod. "Yes." It's heavy and flat. Hive's shoulders tighten up, hard and shaking. His arms pull inward; it serves to bury his face further but, also, serves to prop his face /up/ just a little bit higher, to push his head upwards against the others' touches. The fires sharpen again, harder-defined. Jax's thumbs rasp against Hive's skull, his touch gentle-light even if his work-roughened (acid-pitted) (permanently glassblowing-burn-scarred) hands tend towards calloused-hard. The kiss he leans in to deposit against the top of Hive's head is feather-light, too. The sick clench that twists and tightens inside him is not; it churns and roils with questions that bubble up in his mind even if they don't make it to his lips, so many << What -- >> and << Are you ever going to tell -- >> and << How can we -- >> and << What do you -- >> that jockey for position. His fingers brush down against the scars again. And, outwardly, he is just quiet. For all the silent tremors, that somehow animalistic curling in of Hive's severe form, Jim returns it not with a resistance but a /firming/, more /solid/ and stable pressure of hand, of mind, cradling the back of the other's skull with a rising fumbling pitch of -- just, fuck it, jimmy. Something /territorial/ of this place. These people. This terrible, hateful fragile moment, as though it were something he could put his shoulder against, sink in his toes, /move/. Take control of. "What'd they find." Because a sudden terrible suspicion has begun to leak in like a patient ink. If the news was good, they wouldn't be here like this. "Stars." Hive says this with a ragged laugh that shakes through his thin shoulders. "Drilled a hole through my skull and found my head's full of stars, man." One of his shoulders hitches upwards, presses up against Jax's knuckles. "Thought that was your fucking territory. Musta stole them right out your damn -- your damn --" He breaks off again here, something heavy pressing up against both men's minds, then pulling back with an unhappy mumble. "... fucking stars." The edges of the firelight glimmers, twinkling bright for a shining moment like starlight, like a thousand shimmering stars reflected in Jackson's sunglass-mirrored gaze. Which stares at Hive blank and uncomprehending, a blankness mirrored in the << -- ? >> in his mind. "Wh --" His head tips forward, down against Hive's, then lifts again. "They found /what/." For a moment that mental pressure in Jim's mind is almost tantrum-snatched on, pulled IN, for that tempting ease and clarity a shared mind might offer. The sudden dazzle of constellations surrounding them renders the world /weird/ and absurd and -- "The hell kind of test were they /doing/?" "Biopsy." Hive sits up shakily, staring at the glimmering firelight and then finally reaching for his hat to take it back and yank it back down on his head. "Astrocytoma. The tumor -- the cancer cells are um. They call it that because the cells they're in are shaped like stars. You should. You should talk to. Flicker, he has all the. I just. Can't with the fucking details right now." Jackson has, with all seriousness, been starting to picture what sort of mutant powers might have injected /actual/ star-pieces into Hive's brain, what kind of complications might arise from having bits of space-rock stuck up in there -- they've met a /whole/ lot of Very Odd Powersets, okay, and just when he is starting to wonder what would happen if space rock started dinging at Hive's brainchip the words tumor and cancer ping loud and heavy through his consciousness. The starlight flares brighter, glittering, dazzling, and then dies back down to just the cool misty-silver burn of the fire. His fingers trail down against Hive's cheeks as Hive pulls back, one glowing hand dropping to fold against the telepath's bony knuckles and squeeze his hand tight. "Okay." It's steady and quiet even if the ricocheting chaos of his thoughts is jumping to everywhere, to every healer he knows, every doctor he knows, what money they can collectively scrape together, what treatment options will look like; it settles down into a determination as brightly starlit as the flare that just shone in the room. "Okay. Okay. We know a lot of people. We can figure out. What comes next." "Pffff..." Jim isn't - as surprised as he'd have expected himself to be. He'd already braced for it, and it lands in him like a baseball in a glove. Just - a solid smack of impact, and it's being pitched down the rest of his mental corridors like meat thrown to ravenous dogs. Cancer. << the hell we not think of that; never had telepathic problems before; Luci couldn't fix it; should have been one of the /first/-- >> And a cold chill. << or maybe the borging did cause it. like sunlight slowly causing skin cancer- >> He's already handing back the hat, grip dropping away when Hive sits up and then leaning back in his seat. Hunting down his dice again and dropping a heavy hand on /them/ instead. Rumbling, "What comes next is I'm /rolling/ again." He thrusts out a palm. Dice plz. For one moment, his steady-hard blue eyes are locked on Hive's. Hive's eyes lock back on Jim's, his hand tightening in Jax's as he turns the edges of the hat back up neatly on his head. << -- wouldn't have caught it except Luci's constant fucking /dogging/ me about -- >> This irritable reflexive grumble ends in a digging of his knuckles against his eyes, his jaw slowly working from side to side. And he looks back down. To the fire, and to the dice, turning over the canister with a sharp-chuffed breath of laughter. "Fuck. Sure. Gonna need all the goddamn brains we can get."