Logs:First Fig
| First Fig | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia | 2024-11-30 *(Horus --> Matt): I'm very worried! This might be the most important question I asked him all day! |
| Location
texts & <NYC> Lagniappe Studios - Astoria | |
--- <NYC> Lagniappe Studios - Astoria This is a sprawling complex, occupying several floors of an unobtrusive building along the waterfront. Inside it is anything but unobtrusive, an indulgently appointed creative haven for music and art. It's split between the considerably larger recording studios that take up the first several and the smaller art studio at the very top. Its tall windows drenching it in natural light and providing a breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline. The design of the place -- whimsical, comfortable, colourful, with eclectic handcrafted furniture by local artisans, state of the art equipment and to-die-for acoustics -- leaves plenty of space to hole up and get creative in its array of lounges, studio rooms, equipment storage, writing and production rooms, and tracking and mastering suites. Matt has a habit of and aptitude for sashaying into unfamiliar places as though he owns them, but here his steps have been slow -- just short of hesitant, at time. Maybe it's because he has encountered nobody to charm, a fact that grows steadily more surreal the farther he gets into the building. Despite the chill outside he has brought no coat, his black suit stark against pale skin and white shirt, the cut sleek and modern yet not at all at odds with the vest and cravat in emerald green arabesques that match the embossing on his dress boots. He does outright hesitate when he steps out of the elevator into a luxurious but wholly empty lounge. "Darling, are you in here somewhere?" He doesn't even raise his voice, which carries at least two warring anxieties along with a fierce incredulous delight that isn't so common to hear from him anymore. Matt is left alone, for a bit, to roam the empty lounge, still so fresh with its new-renovation shine the sawdust-and-paint smells linger in many of the pristine untouched rooms. Probably he could identify at least a couple of the artisans in their circles who crafted some of the never-yet-used furniture here or made the artwork gracing the deserted rooms. Mostly deserted rooms. One of the writing rooms, unlike every other room, is a bit of a whirlwind, Ryan's favorite violin and two of his guitars, his laptop and tablet and about infinity papers and notebooks covered in a mess of notes and lyrics (and about infinity more torn and crumpled and covered in angry slashed-out blacked-out messes of redactions and changes), quite a lot of empty booze and quite a lot of half-filled booze and some empty bags of powder, a few take-out containers although proooobably not quite as many as there should be. Matt's got a little time to explore, anyway, before the elevator moves again, first bringing Ryan's familiar signature (not dead, unlikely as it was to really be a worry) into his awareness and then disgorging him out onto the floor in his trim hybrid chair. He looks far less put together than Matt -- soft grey very rumpled tee on which PRIDE has been written in black and then X'd out in favor of WRATH in jagged rainbow, black kilt with interspersed pink, purple and blue panelling between its pleats, his boots supported by a wealth of heavy bracing up his legs. Hair rumpled, his normally neatly groomed scruff of beard several days overgrown. He's blinking when he spies Matt in a stark confusion, then backing away through the doorway. Back in again. He rubs his far-too-wide-eyes, looks at Matt again. There's a shiver in the air, string music that's low and unsettling, at once queasy and on edge like a jumpscare waiting to come. His head moves one direction slowly and then the other direction. Matt had wandered around the rest of the floor and before returning to the one that Ryan has none-too-gently broken in. He's leaning casually against one of the tables, his eyebrows rising up when Ryan retreats and not coming back down when he returns. "I'm real," he supplies helpfully. His voice is soft and even, but roiling with fear and joy and anger and lust. "I'm terribly sorry to turn up like this, but Horus thinks you're dead because you didn't tell him how orcas keep their dead fish hats on." He pushes upright and pours glass of something in easy reach -- bourbon it is. "I can never tell with him, but he seemed pretty upset. So I came to check on you. This place is magnificent." Both "this place" and the sweep of his hand are probably meant to encompass the whole facility and not this one wreck of a room. "Goddammit." This seems distinctly irritated, when Matt confirms that he is in fact real. Ryan passes a hand across his eyes, slumping back into his chair and then wheeling across several discarded-crumpled papers to roll back into the room. He shakes his head -- less irritable the second time as he rummages his phone up from under a notebook, gives up on it immediately when he looks at the many maaany notifications angrily clamoring for his attention, and instead opening Signal on his laptop and typing in Horus's name to answer directly there. "Huh? Oh, this --" Ryan's voice sounds dismissive in tone, but there's a hard wrench of pain in its empathic signature. "Guess s'aright. Kinda -- rethinking my plans. How. Um. How you. Been." Matt lifts just one eyebrow at his reception, and though his expression doesn't otherwise change, the fact that he refrains from answering immediately might be telling in itself. "I can't begrudge you the sentiment." Notwithstanding which, he sounds very much like he's begrudging it. "It's as often as not my own reaction to realizing the same." There isn't much of anything behind this, not even the self-loathing it implies. He circles the room once and returns to lean on a different table. "Awful. I think." This is pretty blank, too. "I wanted to be there for you and Jax. I still do. But I don't know that I would have been much help if I weren't banned from your home and the school both." There's grief, strangely layered and complicated, muffled with concern. He downs half the glass at a go. "How have you been? I'm tempted to extrapolate from when we last spoke and...this." The sweep of his hand this time definitely indicates the wreck of a room around them. Then, cautiously hopeful, "But this is your next album in the making, no?" "No, no, it's not, it's not, it's not you --" Ryan shakes his head, and there's a frenetic energy flitting sharp-edged in his voice, layered messily in with an antsy restless exhaustion far too wired to sleep, buoyed by a dizzying mix of chemicals that doesn't feel good but certainly feels very-very-very powerfully charged. "I was kinda hoping I was hallucinating I write some good shit when I'm hallucinating. S'good to see you, though. I think. I'm --" He hesitates, rubs at his face again. "Sorry. That you're awful." He starts to reach for a bottle, too, but doesn't pick it up. Instead he picks up one of the many notebooks around, grimaces at the most recent page. He sets it back down without answering. "Tch. What fucking home, man." Matt looks back at Ryan, his expression lapsing into a rare unguarded surprise that quickly slides away beneath a rueful smile. "I regret that I've not brought you quite the right timbre of creative madness, though..." This is affectionate and concerned, though there are -- possibly unrelated -- sparks of fierce anger and equally fierce desire that probably account for him thinking better of whatever he was going to say before he trailed off. He drains his glass and refills it instead. "Pardon. Where you are presently residing." Here's a wholly different anger and grief, and a frustration that's at least familiar in proximity to discussions of Ryan's residence. "I know that it isn't any safer now than it was before, but it may never be, and if you could only." No trailing off this time, he just stops. It's hard tell whether he's picking the sentence back up or starting another when he ventures, much quieter, almost embarrassed, "move in with me." "Oh-h-h don't you worry, I'll get there eventually." Ryan's smile, at once too thin and too bright, is maaaaybe not the most reassuring. His hand has dropped to one wheel, absently rocking his chair back and forth in a small half-arc. He looks almost taken aback by the offer, hand seizing hard against the wheel to arrest its motion abruptly. His cheek clicks against his teeth, and though the sound is quiet it brings a sharp sting with it, a muddle of confused angry ache. "You got your -- I got my -- you don't --" he starts, flustered, but then redirects with a quick shake of his head. "Ain't the house, I could buy a new house. Look at this place, cher, I could buy five new houses. Home ain't a damn house, fuck." Matt doesn't flinch, but his preternatural stillness reads vaguely like he has just violently quashed the urge to flinch. "I'm sorry, that was obviously an absurd thing to say." Hurt, raw and mortified. His eyes skip away from Ryan to fix on a sheet of paper crumpled and discarded on the floor. "But I wasn't talking about the house, because that isn't home, and I know it's my own --" He physically claps a hand over his mouth, but even the muffled grinding of his teeth carries the despair he's trying to hold back. His eyes flick to the door, and he slowly lowers his hand. "I thought I could hold it together." His words are shaky, but maybe paradoxically he is a little steadier. "But the moment I saw you I just -- tabarnak." He starts to lift the glass again, but sets it down on the table and steps away from it as if he expects it to follow him. "I don't know what you need -- other than a good trip -- but I'm pretty sure it isn't this." "NO it's not -- I mean, I don't know what this is!" Ryan's hand flings out towards Matt, his eyes wide. "You come here and -- and what! Invite me to live with you? Like I can just -- like you can just... what is that, even? What'm I supposed to do with that? Just ditch my family and --" He drops his hand to his lap, the impact against the flap of his kilt strangely noiseless in the sudden total silence in the room. The quiet stretches for one second and then another -- Ryan's shoulders pull inward in a brief soundless twitch of a laugh. He speaks again, sharp and abrupt. "-- honestly, might as well, they wouldn't even fucking notice." "I said it was absurd!" Matt has ricocheted back around to anger, but it's tightly controlled and gutters again in short order. "You don't have to do anything with it. I've just -- never, ever lived alone -- not even in the fucking labs. And now I'm haunting the corpse of my home, I've destroyed my family, and I'm losing my godsdamned mind." This all comes out in not quite a monotone, but certainly a much flatter one than he usually allows himself. "But I can deal with this kind of crazy. I shouldn't've made it your problem." He's quiet a moment, careful even with his breathing -- it's audible anyway, though it doesn't tell much of the chaos beneath it. He crosses the room and for a moment looks like he might just keep going out the door, but then he sinks down to one knee next to Ryan's chair. "You're all going through hell." There is a fear in this he's trying to drown in the weirdly muted whirlwind of his emotions. "But I haven't been around, I don't." His teeth grind hard. "What do you mean?" Ryan presses his palm to his face as if this will shield him from Matt's anger. His shoulders, too bony beneath his rumpled tee, have tightened hard. "You're going through hell. Everyone's going through hell. I'm sorry things have been shitty. I'm sorry I've been shitty. I'm sorry you fucked up your family. I'm sorry about a lot of fucking things." His voice is lower, tighter, a strain in it from the effort of holding back the tumult that wants to break through -- even so there's still the edges of uncomfortable jittery edge and heavy grief and sharp prickly irritation bleeding through in faint erratic empathic licks. "I -- It don't matter, I should get back to this stupid shitty album. One fucking thing I can still do, at least." Matt tilts his head and studies Ryan intently. "You haven't? Been shitty?" Perhaps he didn't intend it, but it takes no empathic audiokinesis to mark his uncertainty, and it harmonizes with a much subtler disquiet that's been weaving through his soundscape without much apparent relation to what they've been discussing. "It matters to me. It's not going to delay your album so very much to just talk to me for a minute." He sounds uncharacteristically helpless, even a little desperate. "Please? I estimate we've got at least five minutes until my next insane overture." Ryan is still. Quiet, his eyes squeezing shut and then opening wider than before -- kind of red, his pupils wide and a little jittery, though he looks a little on the verge of tears his eyes are far too dry to actually be crying. There's a hint of it all the same, wavering behind the register of his voice and contrasting very oddly with the bright energy of his words when they finally spill over all in a rush. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't know how to -- to be anything to anyone anymore, my family, they don't -- shit, it's been so long since I had any idea how to reach B but now I feel like she's a million miles away. Spence don't never want shit to do with me and can you blame him? I got the most mobile kid on the planet and I'm a goddamn useless cripple, the fuck can I offer him? Whole time everyone was missing he was rocketing off halfway 'cross the planet every chance he could get, some parent I am. And ages I been building this whole damn thing thinking it'd be a place Jax and Shane and I could --" He cuts himself off with a hard swallow, sudden blink. "Doesn't really matter. Jax always has so much on his plate and on his worst damn day he's ten times the man I'll ever fucking be and I -- I just -- just don't know what I can --" He stops, pulls in a shaking breath -- abruptly and on a dime the register of his voice changes; there's no force to it, not an empathic push, just a sudden and abrupt 180 whiplash in mood, spinning wild and whirling from grief and hurt into something kind of fiercely, vehemently animated. It's not happy, really, but it's wild and compelling. "Don't matter. Maybe I'm no damn good at being Ryan but I can sure as hell still be Ryan Black." Matt must have expected at least some of this intensity. He knows Ryan well enough, knows the circumstances well enough. He had already launched into his engaged and empathic listening act, presumably in expectation of it. For all that he still struggles to keep up with the rapid spill of Ryan's explanation. He raises himself to Ryan's eye level, poised to respond when the sudden about-face pre-empts whatever argument or consolation or encouragement he was formulating. His lips part, but no sound emerges as he struggles to pivot. There's no obvious suggestion as earlier that this is any attempt to moderate the effects of his own emotions on an already distraught empath. There's no obvious suggestion of anything, really, until he reaches out to lay his hand on Ryan's cheek. "You sure as hell can," he agrees, fiery affection belying his mild tone. "But I wouldn't be here if you weren't also Ryan. I'm here because I knew no matter how badly you're hurting or how low your opinion of yourself, you'd still pull yourself together and answer your surprise bonus kid's feather-brained questions." His eyes are glassy, and he blinks them clear in faintly uncomprehending surprise. "Alright, and I'm here because I'm madly in love with you and I've missed you with a fierceness and I wanted --" He scrunches his eyes shut and takes a deep breath. "You. Not Ryan Fucking Black, though I do like that guy's music." "It was an important question," Ryan replies with a fierce defensiveness, "the world's weird as hell." He lifts his hand, curling it over Matt's. His head turns, cheek pressing against the other man's palm. "I know you do. I know. But I just -- I don't know how to..." His hand is squeezing tighter against Matt's. "You have no idea how many messages I get every damn day from kids all over the world, you know. Whether they just manifested or been freaks for years but -- so many of them, scared and desperate and there's so fucking few of us out there they have to reach out to for --" He's shaking his head, picking his phone up and flicking through to one of his many inboxes to hand it over to Matt. Even staff-curated as it is to weed out the spam and death threats, the fanmail is heavily cluttered with not just the ardent gushings of eager fans but the increasingly desperate pleas for advice, resources, support, a listening ear, of mutants in increasingly dire-sounding straits, twinned more often than not. Quite often these emails are one and the same -- -- listened to "Home Again" on repeat for months when my parents kicked me out --, / -- "Save Me" got me through Prometheus but somehow the world feels way more terrifying now than jail did -- -- feel like sometimes the hope for your next album is the only thing keeping me going hahhhh -- and on, and on, and on; though he clearly makes some attempt to answer some of them there is quite obviously no possible hope of getting through even a fraction of the daily influx. "-- It used to mostly just be the musicians, you know. Advice, like, how can we make it, but now it's -- fuck. Everyone is so fucking terrified. It's just -- so fucking dark all the fucking time, you know? For so long. For everyone. And there's so little out there, it's like, fuck." The sound around them now stirs in a triumphant orchestral roll that thrums quite visibly through Ryan. "I'm just one fucking guy. If Ryan Black lights the way for all them people, feel like setting Ryan on fire gotta be worth it." Matt accepts the phone, leaning on the armrest of Ryan's chair as he scrolls and scrolls, brows hitching up at the sheer volume and then furrowing in slow as he reads, the smaller fluctuations of his expression difficult to track. "I thought I did have an idea," he admits, a little subdued. "There are magnitudes of ideas to be had, I suppose." He lowers the phone and looks up into Ryan's eyes with a quick back-and-forth flick. "Your music brings hope and joy to a lot of people, but that doesn't make it more important than you are. And even if it did? Ryan Black needs you. Without you he's just some rock star who hasn't got a blessed clue how orcas keep their hats on." There are other emotions cutting chaotically across the very artificial steadiness of his confidence. He cups Ryan's cheek again, thumb brushing gently against the unruly beard. "If you don't know how to be, writing yourself a way is how you light it for everyone else, no? What are you lighting, otherwise?" "That don't show you the shit they weed out. You wanna know how many people each day tell me they wanna kill me cuz --" Ryan is grinning, here, bright, pushing his chair back as a laugh ripples giddy off him, "and that's the fucking randos, we start counting hush-hush contingencies the government's making then whew." He flings his arm up, wide to the space around them. "I'm just one fucking guy, love, and yeah sure we all might die anydamntime but every time I step out the door it's a decent chance it's the day someone fucking ices me. I just hope by the time they do I've lit the way for a whole fucking horde of badass freaks who are louder and angrier than I am." His head rolls to the side, eyes stuttering on his violin case, something in it twitching him for a second before he looks away. "-- kinda imagined I'd be building this place with -- I mean, whatever. Name means a lot. Gonna use it while I still can." Matt stands back up and drains the glass he'd set down before. "In case that's not a rhetorical question, I don't want to know." His fury is sharp and consuming. "You're one fucking guy -- no just about it. You wouldn't talk about anyone else like -- dear gods why are you so infuriatingly hot?" The anger hasn't actually receded, but it's liberally mixed with amusement. "The name means a lot. The music speaks volumes. Use it as loudly and as passionately as you can, but don't write yourself off." He finds the bottle of bourbon and refills the glass again. "Don't write me off." This is suddenly despondent, and then just as suddenly vehement. "I am dying to hear this album." "Stop it," Ryan snaps, and if Matt's fury is consuming his -- picked up, echoed, kindled far more intense in its empathic kiln, blisters blinding and raw. "Who the fuck else would I talk about like this, Matt? You wanna pretend this is insanity or depression or some slight on you, fine, just find me one goddamn other person in my position here, okay? And if you say Jax I swear to God I will deck you, he has his own world of shit to deal with and thank fuck it is not mine. Going on six goddamn years now I have had this fucking target on me and maybe I won't have it alone forever but right now I do so fuck you, okay, but yeah," somewhere here there are shivers of terror rippling erratically through his fury, and he pushes his chair back hard, thumping abrupt against the wall. His shoulders slump heavily. "I wouldn't talk about anyone else like this. I can't. There's nobody fucking else like this." "There is nobody else like you!" Matt hisses, as if keeping his voice quieter would quiet the rage. "Nobody! This is what I've been trying to say!" He goes to toss back his drink, but his hand is suddenly shaking much too hard and he sets the glass firmly, carefully back down. "I know that you are in such danger, always, more than I can ever understand." Whether or not it's also being drawn along by Ryan's, his terror is keen and desperate. "But this does not make you fucking -- disposable ben tabarnak." Ryan is hunching forward in his chair, palms pressing hard against his eyes. He's gone silent again, the empathic storm briefly dampened around him, and when it opens back up it's a slow cautious trickle that shivers in Matt's direction with an unstable flux of anger and upset, fear and sick exhaustion that he's trying and not quite managing to keep in hand. "Nobody's disposable, that's not..." He's started to push himself back towards Matt but gives up halfway, just slumps back into his seat. "We all die, Matt. You know that better than most. I'm not trying to -- I'm not -- I just don't know how to wake up every day with so many people expecting so much and a time bomb that keeps ticking louder and louder and I just --" He cuts himself off, his face dropping into his hands. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I love you. There's just always so much to do and I can't stop I don't know what happens if I stop." Matt seems to recognize Ryan isn't going to make it all the way to him before Ryan even does. He's closing the rest of the distance and sinking down again to gather Ryan to him. "I do know," he murmurs, bleak and accepting, into the other man's hair and tucks his head into the crook of his neck. "And I am selfish and fucked up but I don't want you to stop. I want only to be somewhere for you to rest, however you can, because you must sometime, to go on." He kisses Ryan's forehead. "I promise you are no more a danger to me than I am to myself. There is a freedom in that. You don't need to be anything for me." A ferocious, commanding certainty thrums deep in his chest. "You are enough. So much more than enough." Ryan wraps his arms tight around Matt. His fingers press hard against the other man's suit, and though Matt can feel the trembling in his shoulders, the silence in the room is blanketing them heavy once more. It closes in around them long, and he's reluctant to let go. Doesn't, even when he speaks again -- without moving, doesn't need to, his voice quiet and wry even though his mouth hasn't moved, face buried still against Matt's neck. "Pff, 'course I am. I'm Ryan fucking Black." | |
