Logs:Buffer

Buffer
Dramatis Personae Lucien, Steve	2024-02-03 "There must be some kind of disarmament joke to be made here, but it's not coming to me."
Location <NYC> High Line - Chelsea / <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital - Upper East Side
Built on a freight rail, the High Line once was a railroad and has been reclaimed as green space in the middle of the city. A park situated high above Manhattan, what was once a rusty industrial wasteland is now a stretch of peaceful space to lounge and relax among grass and flowers and plant life. There are restaurants, ice cream sandwich stands, a beer garden, and the view all along the elevated parkland is unbeatable. It's overcast, if mild for February, and the rain that the grey skies promise shortly is keeping crowds in the park to a lighter trickle. It suits Lucien just fine; it means the interruptions on his or his companions end for selfies and autographs have been kept to a minimum. He is dressed down, more or less, today, luxuriously soft cream angora sweater over a forest green button down, evenly faded blue jeans, the whole ensemble -- well, on someone else this would probably be a very normal level of fit but Lucien's habitually fussy vanity makes the looseness stand out more than it otherwise would, clothes Somewhat Too Big on a frame whose startlingly rapid diminishment is only now beginning to approach the sleeker level of athleticism he had prior to his Captain America bulking-up. Currently, he is nursing a slow cider and patiently waiting for Steve's turn on Encounters With Eager Fans to be over. Only once the pair of gushing teenagers has gotten their photographs and moved on is he picking up their previous conversation as neatly as if it had not been interrupted at all: "-- I dare say New York has been startlingly quiet as compared to your global chaos." His brow pinches slightly at this statement and he punctuates it with a quick rap of knuckles against the wooden table. "-- at least by way of explosions," he is qualifying, mildly. "I suppose the emotional landscape in our circles is always -- fraught." The soft chuff of Steve's breath -- it doesn't even steam in the unseasonably springlike air -- is barely recognizable as laughter. He's wearing a black canvas jacket over a red, blue, and purple plaid shirt, battered indigo jeans, and scuffed-up black combat boots. He'd just picked up his shield for the photo op, but is now lowering it gently to where he'd kept it leaning against his chair. The star and stripes paint job is aesthetically scuffed here and there. "Gosh, I'm nowhere near arrogant enough to think I took the drama with me, but if I could take the explosions with me..." He just shakes his head and takes a pull of his beer. "Well. Wouldn't do much good, since I'd just bring it back here over and over. There's no place like..." His expression does something complicated that ends in a faint frown. "...home. How's the ah…landscape in Ridgewood?" He winces. Scrubs a hand over his face. "Are they even back in the house yet?" "Mmnh." In response to the question of the Hollands Lucien first takes a large swig of his cider. He manages an admirably straight face on his deeply accusatory summation: "The entire lot of them have been substituting work for any semblance of addressing inner turmoil, difficult as that is for --" He waggles the neck of his bottle languidly between himself and Steve. "-- present company to understand. And the bomb threats have slowed to a -- steady trickle, but I doubt it will ever be safe for them to move back to that house. They've been busy enough it has not been an enormous upending as yet, but I expect once every mutant rights group from here to Timbuktu is done begging Jackson's time for a speech or panel --" His head shakes, his expression just a bit more pinched than it has been. "Filling the gaps on Ryan's security team has been a struggle as well. Quite a number of his employees unsurprisingly jumped ship last year." When he slumps back against the table it's a little bit heavier than before, head drooping into his palm before he collects himself and pulls a little unsteadily upright. "Obie is quite enjoying all the time he gets to spend with Flèche, at the least." Steve nods sagely. "I've never had a turmoil, personally, but if I ever discovered one I'd see to it smartly and with extreme prejudice." He salutes Lucien with his beer bottle. "Meanwhile, I assume you just cajole, bamboozle, or terrify your inner demons into doing your bidding." Is he joking? It's a little harder to tell than usual, but the topic is clearly unsettling to him and his supposed absence of inner turmoil. "Well. Hope things settle down enough for them to have a proper home again. Wherever that winds up being. I don't suppose you know if…" He looks down at the tabletop and does not finish that sentence. Just gives another small shake of his head and looks up at Lucien's heavy slump. "How's your own -- I guess that's not emotional landscape, but your personal landscape here is..." He studies his friend a bit more closely. "Slimming down even faster than you bulked up, which is saying something. There must be some kind of disarmament joke to be made here, but it's not coming to me." "I have cut many a deal with my inner demons. I expect it will be quite a day when they come to collect." There's a faint and amused tug at the corner of Lucien's mouth. "That is a problem for Future Lucien, little though I envy him." He takes another sip from his bottle and huffs, quiet. "Captain America needs a good many more muscles than I do. The most strenuous fights I engage in these days are battling Flèche for her ropes. She is a very fierce tugger, admittedly." His wrist swirls absently, eyes fixed on the faint glimmers of light refracting through the bottle and onto the tabletop. "Gaétan moved out," he adds in idle update, "little though you'd know it with how often he stops by for meals and doing his laundry." His brows pinch slowly as he ponders what other Life Updates might be of interest. He's starting to offer, somewhat uncertain: "I have started dating someone," though this cautious revelation is interrupted by the abrupt arrival of the promised rain -- fat and heavy drops starting to spatter down on the tabletop between them. He is glancing up at the sky then instead, downing the rest of his cider in a hurry as he reaches for the umbrella on the bench beside him. "I heard Future Lucien might be taking up the shield again, but I suppose it remains to be seen how many muscles he needs for that." Steve leans in a little conspiratorially. "I've also heard they can make anyone look like anything they like in the pictures, these days." He's almost perfected his Old Timer inflection of "these days". Almost. "Isn't that about Desi's level of moving out? In both of their defense, you do have a nice laundry machine. I was half tempted to bring my laundry over while I was living in Red Hook." He looks up when the rain starts, then back down at Lucien. "Dating someone?" His surprise is changing rapidly to delight, undampened by the rain, which he's only casually picking up his shield to block. "Who's the lucky gentleman -- or lady! -- you're stepping out with?" "My laundry machine is your laundry machine, wherever you may hang your -- shield," Lucien is offering magnanimously, as he opens the umbrella. He's glancing around, eyes settling on a nearby recycling bin before he starts to rise with bottle in hand. "And yes, it's been --" But Steve doesn't get any further answer than this; Lucien is swaying on his feet, reaching clumsily for the table -- missing it entirely as he drops unceremoniously to the ground. The bottle has slipped from his hand, eco-friendly intentions cracking into shards on the cement. --- '<NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital - Upper East Side' On the cutting edge of many medical technologies, Mount Sinai Hospital is often ranked as one of the nation's best hospitals. The medical school attached is one of the best in the world, meaning that even your med students know what they are doing. Chin up, then -- when you come in here badly mutilated after the latest terrible catastrophe in Times Square, you're in good hands. The noise and bustle of the ED is just audible down the hall, but there's a kind of peace in here between the regular and irregular sounds of medical instruments, not all of which are currently connected to the patient. The bed is not very comfortable, nor the chairs -- no one is meant to stay here for long, despite the realities of emergency medicine. Steve is in one of the uncomfortable chairs beside Lucien's uncomfortable bed, staring past his friend at the screen of his vitals monitor. His lips are moving, the quiet words barely above his breath not prayers but snatches of Never Alone from the show Lucien is no longer performing eight times a week. The monitors stir before Lucien himself does, pulse speeding with an initial burst of panic that comes in prelude to his eyes opening. Then shutting again, tight -- opening once more, tentative like hopefully the scenery has changed this time. When the hospital remains quite stubbornly in view his eyes go a little unfocused, fixed blankly upwards as he focuses for a few moments on slow and deliberate breaths. It's only after this delay that his head turns to the side, brows pinching as he looks at Steve. There are a thousand questions forming somewhere behind the gathering dread in his expression, and it isn't until after he's (fussily, uncomfortably) pulled the scratchy sheets up over his bare forearms before he settles on one: "{Was anyone hurt?}" Steve sits up straighter and stops singing, but waits for Lucien to get himself together and muster a question. "{My pride was the only other casualty,}" he says, his confident tone wavering only mildly when he adds, "{well, and my phone. I went to check on you and then I was on the ground, too, wondering what the hell was in that cider you tossed back.}" He braces his elbows on the edge of the bed. "{Didn't hurt. But someone had already called 911, and I thought it might look bad if I just made off with your unconscious body.}" He gives a rueful twitch of a smile. "{Especially if I knocked myself out again in the process.}" "Chu désolé." Lucien's eyes are squeezing shut again, his shoulders gone a little tighter. "{Your phone is far more replaceable, at least, than you. I --}" He swallows, looking back up at Steve. His fingers are flexing repetitive and aimless just beneath the sheet, clenching the edge of the fabric into his fist and releasing it again. "{If you were -- did anyone --}" This time, though, the question doesn't make it past the panic clawing at his throat. He's pushing himself up kind of slow, kind of wobbly. "{I ought to go, I -- where are my --}" This does not finish either, though his unconscious plucking at the hospital gown stands in well enough. Steve reaches for Lucien when he starts trying to push upright, then stops himself. His hand closes on the bedside rail, instead. "{I'm pretty tough, and I didn't let anyone else touch you,}" he says, perhaps a little bit too hastily to be altogether reassuring. "{Or, at least, I wouldn't have let anyone else if I could think how the heck to stop the people already trying to help.}" He runs a hand through his still slightly mussed if no longer damp hair. "Then this fella started yelling at everyone to stay back, because you must have been 'ODing on fentanyl', which is '50 times stronger than heroin' and can be 'absorbed through the skin'..." His hand turns up, a gesture more forceful on him but no less helpless. Lucien has been starting to pluck the tape from his IV line but Steve's words halt him. His hand redirects, knuckles digging hard against his eye. "You cannot touch someone and --" begins a very familiar gripe at this particular myth, but he's stopping with a small grimace. "{-- goodness, I suppose in my case it might be the rare time that bit of misinformation has some air of truth to it.}" His fingers are flexing again as he lowers his hand, and he's subsiding reluctantly back against his pillow. "{There are enough people already who think me terribly unfit to carry your shield. News of my sordid lapse back into addiction --}" But here he's stopping with a faint flush, his eyes lowering and his voice softer, now. "{... would still be much better received than the truth.}" He exhales slow, not quite looking up at Steve, now. "I did not mean to -- my apologies. For the trouble. And for your dignity." "Oh, you have me trained well," Steve says indulgently, "I almost told him that before I thought through the alternatives. {The whole ambulance ride I was thinking, 'I really wish he had a great publicist, like I do.'}" He releases the grip he'd kept on the railing, with some apparent difficulty. "The shield isn't just a shield, but it's not a moral litmus strip. {Your career will survive, because you do have a great publicist, even if he was unavailable at the time. But I wouldn't think any less of you even if you were…}ODing on fentanyl." His voice drops low, too, and isn't altogether steady. "Just thanking God you're alive. {They say you're starving, but they want to run more tests.}" Lucien's frown only deepens at this, and now he is getting up, carefully plucking at the needle first before removing the rest of the leads. "Starving, what nonsense. I eat quite well. {And I've had nothing to OD on,}" sounds, if anything, a touch more miffed, "{my usual dealer --}" This ends in just a small sag of his shoulders. "{Besides, I hardly need to be in a hospital to eat more. It seems a simple enough cure, and one I should rather take in my own home with my own clothes.}" "{If you're eating enough and still dropped -- what?}" Steve doesn't actually look over Lucien's body as he sits up. Presumably he's done plenty of that while waiting for his friend up wake. "{-- what, 50 pounds in one month? That's even more reason to get checked out.}" But he's rising and going over to another chair, picking up the stack of neatly folded clothing and shoes wrapped in clear plastic and passing them to Lucien. "I thought you must have been doing it deliberately, and it was some kind of newfangled actor thing, same as when you put on the weight for the role." His lips press into a thin line. "I didn't have to go through all the -- protein shakes and weight-lifting for my role." Lucien accepts his belongings with a small dip of his head. "{Of course I did it deliberately.}" He sounds vaguely puzzled that this is even a question. "{I am --}" Only a small deliberation here before he continues, "{-- adept at fine-tuning metabolism. You know that.}" He is shedding the gown with the pragmatic complete lack of modesty born of many years of heavily assisted quick changes, tugging his own clothing back on quickly. "{I no longer needed that body. I just --}" Here his hesitation is longer, not a careful tuning of word choice but an uncertainty punctuated by a small tensing of his shoulders. "{-- want my own back.}" "{Of course you --} Steve stutters to a stop. Starts to say something else. Doesn't get farther than pursing his lips. He's so busy being flummoxed he doesn't turn away when Lucien strips as he tends to do. "{I didn't know,}" is what he settles on, finally. "It's not as if I didn't have my own hangups with this." He gestures at his superhumanly buff physique. "Heck, you got some of that written into the show. But that was about identity and purpose, and a far cry from feeling like this body wasn't my own." He stands up, only to lean back against the edge of the bed to keep out of Lucien's way. "{You were already plenty strong by normal people standards, and most men want to look like…}" He sucks in a breath through his teeth. "{...like me.} That came out a lot more vain than I meant it, and anyway you aren't most men." He blows out a long, slow breath. "Just would've never guessed it was so rough you'd -- hurt yourself trying to undo it." "{I did not deliberately put myself in the hospital,}" Lucien clarifies, a touch stiffly. "{I am normally quite good at managing --}" His lips press together, and he devotes an unusually intense focus to the matter of buttoning his shirt back up. "{It only sounded truthful. Your body is quite desirable.}" In his current somewhat unsettled tone, this comes out sounding far more like he is delivering Steve an embarrassing and unpleasant diagnosis rather than a compliment. He's looking down with a frown -- his focus has not availed him, his shirt buttons offset by one, and with the same determination he is unbuttoning them to try again. "It is hardly the worst thing I have done to myself for a role. I expect my spine will never recover from the Faun's ludicrous hooves. And certainly it hardly begins to compare to what you --" Here he is cutting himself off at the sound of voices and shadows of movement just beyond the door; the interruption of his slate of monitors summoning imminent threat of Being Nursed At. He's attempting to rearrange his expression, wipe away some of its current disgruntlement, but he only vaguely approaches his usual veneer of calm before giving up with a visibly exhausted wilting. His hand tips toward the door in a quiet plea for Steve to handle Peopling instead, together with a wry: "I may have need of your shield." "Aw shucks, Luci." Steve is blushing as if he doesn't receive far more enthusiastic commentary on the desirability of his body every day. "I'm not everyone's cup of tea, and that's fine. Wasn't trying to argue you -- or anyone else -- should want to look like me. Point was I shouldn't have assumed you would want to." His head dips. his eyes drifting to the shield leaning against the chair. "There's a lotta ways to hurt, and they're not always straightforward to compare. Couldn't tell you whether getting ripped apart in that radiation chamber hurt more than twenty-some years feeling sick and humiliated and helpless, and I sure won't say it's better or worse than anything you've been through, on the stage or off." His broad shoulders hitch. "{It's just -- different.}" He looks up at the sound of incoming, and with the flick of one boot kicks the shield up into his hand before Lucien has even finished making his request. "Look, it's a reflex," he says, only a little defensive, but he doesn't put the weapon down. Just slings it by its straps over one shoulder as he goes to the door, twitching the curtain shut behind him. Lucien can see him silhouetted on the fabric where he's parked himself casually in the doorway, one arm braced at head height on the doorframe to showcase his massive pecs to better effect. His words are lost to the general noise from outside, but his easy friendly tone and the delighted laughter he draws from the nurses carry well enough. He excuses himself with a lazy, very much non-regulation salute before closing the door and returning to his friend. "Piece of cake. Nice to return the favor for once, even if I don't have nearly your finesse for charming nurses into or out of doing their duty." By the time Steve has returned, Lucien is dressed -- properly, shirt tucked and buttoned neat and prim, collar arranged just so over his sweater, looking very much like a man who has never had a single trouble figuring out which button goes where. There is not much to be done for his overall pallor, but his softly amused chuff sounds re-gruntled as well. "{See that. Those are delightfully useful muscles.}" He's pushing himself to his feet and only wobbling a little before setting a hand carefully for steadying on one of Steve's Massive Biceps. "{You just wear them so much better.}" "{I do now,}" Steve agrees easily, plucking up the jacket hanging over the back of the chair. "{It all just felt like a costume when I fetched up at your door. Or armor. Got me through the war, but it sure was a job learning how to live with this and not just fight with it.}" He offers Lucien the crook of his arm. If he flexes just a little in the process, well, what's the harm? "Maybe you can't be Captain America and also yourself, but you did something a heckuva lot harder -- you taught me how to do it." Lucien's eyes lower, his breathing just a little slower and just a little more deliberate. His small silence is ultimately punctuated only by a soft and thoughtful hum, a pleased warmth in his eyes when he lifts them again. His fingers curl in gentle squeeze at Steve's arm. "{Let's go home.}"