Logs:Who By Common Trial

Who By Common Trial
Dramatis Personae B, Jax, Shane, Spencer
In Absentia	2023-09-26 "I don't know how to get out." (later the night of the Nazi attack.)
Location <NYC> Freaktown - Riverdale
Evening has given way to Night and night, in turn, is creeping its way along towards an inevitable dawn. It seems very far away for many here tonight, the starless sky dark and oppressive overhead in the wake of such terror. It's quiet, now, but sleep is elusive in Freaktown tonight; there are lights on in many windows, and clusters of people still gathered in strained silence around the patios and porches swapping plenty of intoxicants but little conversation. Somewhere across the neighborhood there are charred remnants of what should have been the break fast meal, still scattered over the edge of Town Square not far from the haloed silhouette charred onto the pavement in macabre memorial to the night's events. Somewhere closer by, the emergency meal that the food crew had put together afterwards -- no matter how traumatized, people still needed to eat. Reporters have been chased off, many frantic family members reunited with their loved ones, many mutants pouring in from around the city to gawk or to mourn or to help. It's that groundswell of aid that has finally meant some of the medical and security crew have time to eat, themselves. B, at least, has no hypoglycemia to worry about, and perhaps this is why she's the one in here right now, tucked into a cozy study in one of the large mansions, setting a small and private table. Her blue skin is scraped red and raw in many places, her gills tattered at their edges, but she has at least washed off, the cracks spiderwebbed across her face and hands no longer filled with embedded grit. Shane doesn't look quite as battered as his twin, though his skin is, too, more cracked than he would like and his previously dapper clothes in a state of grimy disrepair rarely seen on him. Through a hasty assemblage of a new security detail, through the work of finding everyone a suitable room for the night, through fielding the questions (frantic, terrified, furious) from those community members who saw Jackson Holland fall and fielding the questions (frantic, intrusive, curious) from those reporters who heard about the night's chaotic events secondhand he's seemed to have plenty of energy. It's somewhere at the threshold of this quiet room that that flees all at once. Whether he's heading from B or heading for the food laid out on the table, who knows; he only gets a few feet in before dropping heavily to sit on an end table. The slow sideways blink of his inner eyelids is more noticeable than usual, the membranes milkier over his enormous black eyes from the wealth of scratches marring their surface. Trailing behind but towering over his brother, Spence looks weirdly grown-up and almost preternaturally immaculate in his white-on-white suit, having come from a Ne'ilah service that didn't get attacked, safe across town in Queens. He's done his fair share of bustling about since, on food prep and the kind of general gopher duty to which he's so well-suited. When Shane collapses he blinks -- -- to the table, wide eyes searching his sister's wider ones in helpless entreaty. His hands seem to know what to do, though. He pours a glass of water and jumps -- -- back across the room to offer it to Shane. Jax is slow to find his way to this gathering, many-times-waylaid en route by worried friends or grateful residents or hopeful reporters, but he has finally detached himself from both medicking and questions and is trudging in now. There's no touch of illusion about him tonight, haggard and colorless from his face to his plain white clothes. He drops his -- well, Joshua's -- medic kit onto a table and closes the door behind himself before heading closer to Shane. His arm curls around his eldest son's shoulders in a slow and gentle squeeze. B's eyes don't hold much by way of solace, not much answer. Not much of anything, really, though in fairness it is often hard to read emotion into their pupilless depths -- but in the rest of her inhuman features, the intermittent sharp flutter of her gills and thin press of her strange flattened nose and the very slow-careful deliberation with which she is filling plates for her family there is a rage clear enough for them to see. She brings a pair of plates -- no utensils but that's what ~~claws~~ fingers are for -- over to Shane and Jax. She's not really looking at either of them, just staring hard at the medic kit as she turns over the food. "Is it always going to take death to get you back, then?" Shane takes his plate, and though he does eye the flatware over on the table for a long and considerate moment he doesn't ultimately ask after it. Maybe this is because he is immediately distracted from this thought, eyes snapping up to fix on B. His brows pull inward, shoulders tensing under Jax's arm. "S'not like he chose to be in jail for-goddamn-ever," he's objecting tightly, but this doesn't stop the sharp flutter of his gills or stop his eyes from lifting to Jax. "... are you staying?" Spence shuffles one awkward step to the side, then another. His shoulders are tight but his arms only loosely crossed, fingers fluttering light and quick at his elbow. "Please?" he adds to his siblings' not-exactly requests, with a faint suggestion of button-mashing the etiquette of his adopted but still uncounterintuitive Southern heritage, "...and thank you kindly?" Jax doesn't take his plate right away -- kind of stares at it like he's not sure what it's there for, his brows slowly creasing as he attempts to puzzle it out. "You should," he's starting to say reflexively to B before he clocks that unlike the other, this plate is full of veggies and clearly not suitable for a hungry shark. With this conundrum solved he is taking the plate to, absent and automatic, offer it to Spence. The next question is less straightforward, his shoulders a little tighter. He opens his mouth -- clicks his teeth hard back shut again, and though the pups aren't telepaths they know him well enough to no doubt imagine the flavor of the protests that are surfacing, being considered, found inadequate: Ryan's still down there and 'Y'all' have saw me plenty and -- He swallows, exhales slowly. "Yeah. I mean. Yeah. Looks like we gonna have a -- a lot to figure out." B doesn't much care what order the eating is happening as long as eating happens; she's already making a second vegan plate up when Jax very predictably turns the first aside to his son. "Fifteen years of Prometheus and on my watch those Nazis almost killed you," comes out tight and sharp -- then, much smaller: "... he almost killed you." Her claws click with a small jittery taptaptap on the side of the dish of roast potatoes she's been serving up. It's a moment before she finishes filling the second plate, and she's slow to bring it to the others. "I signed up to follow that man." Whether it is asking for help at all or whether it's this straightforward admission, she sounds kind of stilted. "I don't know how to get out." Shane has just been pouring some of the water Spence brought him -- not to drink it, he's just cupping some in his palm and then splashing it on his face -- and he nearly drops the glass at B giving open voice to the subject they all tacitly decided years ago to Never Speak Of. Probably someone with more baseline reflexes might have dropped it; as is he catches it a few inches down from where it slipped his grasp, only splishing some water up over the edge and onto his leg. "He respects Ba, that's..." But he's trailing off slow and uncertain. His claws scrape thin scratches against the glass. "... fuck, I wish Ion was here." However shaken or worried, whatever he may be feeling about his family or his people, at the end of the day -- and half the night -- Spence is still a starving teenager. He accepts the plate without complaint and starts shoveling food into his mouth. Flaps as he hastily swallows his first bite so he can jump on his father's hedging about Ryan with, "I can get him." For all that he's been offering that sort of thing at the drop of any hat, he doesn't just disappear this time. Perhaps he's learned his lesson! More likely he's just busy wrapping his head around the revelation that his sister has been doing extracurricular terrorism. "Maybe," he suggests, with a hint of a cringe, "the Professor can help?" Jax's eye snaps to B, and then lowers in time with a slow crease of his brows. He takes his plate from B without fuss this time. He sinks down to sit next to Shane on the table, and it's slow and a little mechanical when he starts in on the food. His mouth twists to one side at Spence's; he bites absently at a lip ring. "I don't think he'd --" he's starting to agree with Shane, but he, too, stalls into an uncertain deliberation. He pushes potatoes around his plate, an unsteady shadow shivering around him. The darkness melts away with his next small bite of potato. "S'pose it can't hurt to ask."