ArchivedLogs:Rough and Spikey

Rough and Spikey
Dramatis Personae Hive, Jim, Flicker
In Absentia	2013-03-31 '
Location <NYC> The Bowery
The unassuming brick facade outside nevertheless houses one of New York's more popular music venues, host to many popular acts and launching many more /into/ fame. Wide and expansive, the smooth wooden flooring provides lots of standing room, lots of dancing room, and only very rarely any actual /seats/, save the stools at the bar to one side. Stairways to either side lead up to the balcony, both sides of the upper level providing a good view of the curtained stage. There's music onstage. Ryan (plus one Shelby) is only just taking the stage after the act that opened for him, and the applause even before any music has started is riotous. Up in the front a group of teenagers are screaming. Somewhere in the audience a group of rather more mutanty teenagers are not groupieing quite so hard but are still notably /excite/. Hive isn't radiating much excitement, a drab spot of bland tan t-shirt, brown jacket threadbare and patchy at the elbows and hanging limp on his coathanger-thin frame, faded bluejeans scuffed and frayed. Sneakers falling apart. In short, he looks much the same as ever. A little bit more pinched around the face, a little bit more sharp-angled around the bones. Beside Jackson (always-bright, always-sparkling) he is easily overlooked; when Jackson leaves his side to join the crowd, to join his (maybe?) boyfriend, to dance, he is /even more/ easily overlooked. Beside him there is another young man, Up and About after his long post-acid convalescence; Flicker is carrying the energy for both of them now that Jackson has fled. Hive leans against a wall, arms crossed, eyes vaguely focused up on stage -- though only vaguely, they're not all /that/ focused on anything at /all/. Flat-blank, glassy-vacant. Flicker (a little brighter; dark jeans but bright green Yoshi t-shirt to match his bright green eyes and cheerful smile) is talking to him, leaning in to speak near Hive's ear though given their mindlink it's hardly necessary. The mindlink is muted, though, tamped down into a background buzz as drab as Hive is. Maybe some background music that, if you are /at/ the Bowery, is unnecessary given that it is just an echo of the considerably louder music starting back up onstage at the moment. Hive might be listening to Flicker. It's hard to tell. His vacant-blank stare doesn't register much in it. But something in the words, eventually, twitch his arm -- downwards. Not much. Just slightly. Just enough to brush his fingers up against Flicker's knuckles, and keep them there, touch persisting even as he settles back into generic Slump. Jim's presence is no more colorful than Hive's, and considerably more duck-out-of-water by virtue of age and rebelliously /sour/ temperament under the bright performance lights. He arrived not-quite late (or it would be ‘not late' by his own estimate, though he'd missed the opening band), after only a very dubious glance at his email and a quick realization that tickets DO happen electronically now. The rest had been so much ‘shitshitfuck' and a scramble for public transportation. Now he's here. And wearing a tweed coat, patched on the elbows, and doing his best impression of a cliff face against which teenagers /dash/ themselves as they dance, break like waves and wash away, leaving him unmoved and frowning harder. He's not a little guy. He can keep this up all night. Not to say he isn't listening. Assumably. Even while hunkered and weathering, he'll turn head at most times to watch the band over the heads of the other people clogging the floor, even if his tweed and deep brow wrinkles of Suspicion make it look inherently like he's casing the place for a media exposee. Call it the P. I. syndrome. Exactly when he becomes aware of Hive is difficult to pinpoint; the very slight tang in the back of his mind makes proximity never feel so impossibly far away. And with a dull flat ache that has nothing to do with the four bullets stuck somewhere inside his torso. But he does become aware of him. And at some point, finds himself staring at him, through the drifting-thrashing curtains of bodies dancing, he's watching him from a few yards away. He fishes around in his pocket for the first likely object of medium weight, compressing his mouth. And rather than try to shout over the racket, he pulls out his cheap plastic lighter - this one is hot pink, shut up, it was a steal at 25 cents - and he throws it at Hive's general direction. Aiming at chest-level. << *POKE* >> The lighter flies at Hive, hits him square in the chest. Hive doesn't even move, at this, doesn't seem to register it any more than he's registering anything /else/ around him. Flicker's hand snaps out to snag it before it hits the ground, hand snapping up to catch the lighter almost even before /he's/ consciously registered what it is. The movement of Flicker's hand away from his, though, does turn Hive's head. Down. Towards his hand. And then up. There's communication between them, that is clear from the look Flicker gives Hive, and then the look he gives the crowd. It lands on Jim, stops, sticks there. He tosses the lighter /back/ in lazy underhand. It's a significant delay before Hive looks up, too. Flicker's hand drops again to rest against his, and it's only then that his head slowly rotates again, away from the stage and to the crowd. His eyes are still vacant. They look -- vaguely in Jim's direction. Certainly not /at/ Jim, unfocused as they are. There's a slow mental brush, touching light and almost unnoticeable against each mind in his stable in turn. Touchtouchtouch, touchtouchtouch, like checking in until he finds the familiar one that sent that poke. He pokes /back/, almost uncertainly -- what? It's not a vocalized /what/, it's just flat and questioning. Huhyeshi? When the touch-touch-touch begins to fan out, Jim gives it another hard POKE back, frowning harder. - Well, the frown eases up for a moment, when he catches his lighter and waggles it almost apologetically, or at least /grimacingly/, at Flicker. He /will/ say hi to him shortly. But there's something more pressing here. << */poke/.* *jab* *TUG*. >> Low-scale mental abuse is unleashed on Hive while he approaches, with a very slight undertone of -- urgency? clench? c'mon-c'mon-c'mon, you bastard? << Use your fuckin'- >> "-/eyes/, Hivey." He says this in Hive's FACE once he reaches him. His REAL face. And he points at his face, "/Up here/." As though Hive had been staring at his tits. Hive's mind kind of shifts, absently not so much poking back as just lazy-swatting the nonpsionic attempts at mental abuse in much the same way he would reflexively brush away a gnat. Reflex-flick that doesn't even amount to irritated so much as just automatic. His brows do crease, though, at the sound of his name. Puzzled. "S'Jim, Hive," Flicker leans in to say this again, over the rock-music backdrop. "Here. In front of you." Flicker's head jerks towards Jim in indication. Hive still doesn't really focus, though, << Fucking Jim, >> sharp and irritable, is at least acknowledgment that he has /heard/. Flicker's hand shifts, not brushing against Hive's but curling around it, taking Hive's bony wrist and /moving/ his best friend's hand. Outwards. Towards Jim. He physically /places/ Hive's hand against the older man's, fingers shifting to curl Hive's fingers inward. At first they curl because Flicker is pressing them, moving them, but after a moment Hive's fingers twitch on their own, grip firming. The crease in his brow deepens. Now he /does/ look, downwards at their hands, his own hand tightening as some of that vacancy slowly sharpens into something more like focus, more like /presence/. << ... fucking /Jim/. >> This time it's more like surprise, more like /ache/, more like a sharp sting of want that tightens into a knot in his stomach. Against Jim's, his hand trembles. Jim's brows knot, and the look he gives Flicker isn't a happy one when Hive's hand is fitted into his- not angry, but deeply /troubled/. Working. An echo of grim concern: it's that bad, isn't. Yeah. He clamps down on Hive's hands, that tremble in it something he finds himself not sure he can /stand/, and -- crap, what /do/ you do when you're holding hands with a guy. He gives Hive's hand a kind of impatient-awkward little /shake/, his other hand thumping down onto Hive's - << shit, bony, argh, what the hell >> - other shoulder. "Yeah, you wish," he rasps; smoker-rasp. Maybe throat-clench-growl rasp, too. "Though that's what your ma's been sayin' every night." Flicker answers the look with a deeper frown. Yeah. It's that bad. He slips around to Hive's other side, cutting off a somewhat tipsy young woman before she can crash into Hive. Staking out a niche of space by sheer force of energy alone, perhaps, because his cheerful face doesn't lend itself well to glares. Hive's eyes stay, slowly slowly managing to focus a little more on their hands as his is shaken. << Ma -- >> This is a puzzling concept, apparently. The word doesn't register much past /blank/ in his mind. His bony shoulder shifts upward, not so much shrugging the touch off as pushing up into it uncertainly. Testing what resistance he might find. His gaze stays where it is a long time after it has managed a greater focus, but eventually it lifts. Skating up the arm of Jim's elbowpatched jacket, brushing over stubble, landing eventually on eyes. And then silence. A long silence. His free hand creeps out to find Flicker's; Flicker takes it by reflex, not looking at Hive but up towards the stage. << Aren't you too old for this scene? >> comes eventually, in a jangling chorus of voices. Hive's shoulder will find a solid weight in Jim's hand, his other keeping a kind of stupid-solid grip with dry-bark fingers that permanently feel chapped, rough and calloused. "Keh," it's a sound of something like disgust and relief and exasperation, and he hauls Hive forward into a sudden hard hug, "Cockrag." Hive kind of /falls/ into the hug, a little startled, a little easily-moved. His head turns slowly, half mashed against Jim's tweed jacket. On a delay, his arm lifts, tentative in his awkward back-pat of return hug (one pat, two, and then his hand just stays pressed where it is) like he is not entirely certain how these hug things /work/. He doesn't move away, at least not immediately. There's a faint tremble of bony shoulders, a somewhat shaky breath pulled in. And then a sudden deflation, sinking in against Jim as his fingers fist up, curling-clenching tight into the back of Jim's jacket. Into Flicker's grip. It takes a moment before he straightens, still not really present /enough/ to be self-conscious of the bright wet glimmer of tears that well up-spill down from his dark eyes. << Thailand's pretty. You could've come and visited. >> "And pollinated some exotic Thai flowers while I was at it, huh? Snap some photos." Bizarrely, it's /easier/ somehow when Hive goes limprag, like hanging onto a heap of (<< -bony skinny stupid fuck institutional food ain't been good to him -) laundry that he can just kind of vaguely position-mash against his chest with a long-suffering (relieved, intensely, intensely relieved) slowpat on Hive's back. Pat. pat. "Yeah, buddy. We'll go another time." He kind of awkward-locks his arms around the younger guy like maybe if he just /compresses/ him it can just... fix everything. Like crushing a coal into diamonds. << Gaah why is every fucking thing about you /spikey/. >> << Sure. You looking to /pollinate/, Thailand's good for that. >> Hive's eyes close, squeezing a further trickle of tears out, damp against Jim's jacket. He is fairly easily /compressed/, gangly amalgam of loose clothes and loose bones that folds (hardedged/spikey/) against Jim's thicker coarser frame without much thought given to -- well, much, physically, kind of too /detached/ from the body he wears to pay it a whole lot of mind. There is, though, a steadily growing spikyprickly pulse of feeling, that mashes irritation and exhaustion and relief and regret and longing together into a gruff: << Every fucking thing about you's /rough/. >> Blowing air through his puffed out cheeks, Jim lets out a breath he may as well have been holding for the past few /weeks/, like some iron band is releasing around his lungs. << Hivey, you ain't even /seen/ me get rough yet. >> He grins wryly over Hive's shoulder at Flicker offhand, "You're lookin' good." He extends one hand out to clasp hands with the teleporter, and then eases around to lean against the wall behind Hive. It leaves one arm draped kind of firmly around Hive's shoulders, Flicker to the other side of him. This is totally not hovering. And it's totally not like a huge black stormcloud /hunkered/ down against any bumping or jostling the crowd might throw their way. While the music washes over them, it's too loud to really talk, and too /complicated/ to really think much on it. So Jim doesn't bother to. There's music to listen to anyway.