ArchivedLogs:Against the World

Against the World
Dramatis Personae Dusk, Hive, Tag
In Absentia	2013-07-01 '
Location <NYC> 403 {Geekhaus} - Village Lofts - East Village
There's kind of a college-dorm feel to this place, though some of its occupants have left college behind. Entering the apartment finds visitors greeted by the perpetually messy living room, a mismatched assortment of couches and chairs (and milk crates) surrounding the wide table in the center. The wall holds a range of posters; some political, some sporty, some from video games, and a string of white lights strung over the kitchen doorway might be a holdover from Christmas. The kitchen adjacent is just as cluttered, its table unfit for eating due to its perpetual covering of books, papers, cereal boxes, projects; the fridge is usually sparsely populated. Ketchup. Beer. Not a lot of food. There are two bedrooms here, split between the four people; the fold-out couch in the living room (often folded out !) suggests that at least one of them does not actually claim a room as their own. It's early yet, at least for a work day, when Hive tromps his way back in to his apartment. Afternoon, not even all that late -- but outside it is thunderstorming heavily and the frequent flashes of lightning do not make for ideal conditions in which to be climbing around on tall metal scaffolding. So with the construction site shut down for the day, here is Hive! Soaking wet, his jeans dripping onto the floor when he heads back into his apartment. There's a scowl on his face as he drops his backpack onto the floor just inside the door -- then again, there's /often/ a scowl on his face so that is pretty much par for the course. "Jesus Christ, you didn't need to bring the storm inside." Dusk is shirtless as usual, in jeans, lounging in his favourite armchair -- ok, actually the /only/ armchair mixed in with their mishmash of curb-shopped furniture and milk crates. He has his laptop on his lap, draped sideways in the chair to let his wings hang down over one arm. There's a brief moment where he /thinks/ about grabbing Hive a towel! And then doesn't because fuck it that would mean getting up. He looks healthier than his frequent deathly pallor! Of late he /has/ looked healthier than it, colour in his cheeks and his skeletal-bony form starting to flesh itself out; even his thoughts are healthier, brighter, livelier rather than sluggish-quiet. "-- I could make hot chocolate," he does offer, even if he's still not getting towel. A crash of thunder covers the noise of Tag's approach--which is not the sneakiest, heavy footfalls clanging on the fire escape. The next flash of lightning, however, throws his hunched silhouette on the rain-blurred window in classic horror film fashion. The fresh peal of thunder arrives only a fraction of a second later, as the window slides open to admit a pair of soaked white sneakers, followed by skinny legs, soaked white cargo shorts, a soaked white shirt with a red exclamation point styled to look like a lightning bolt, and, last, Tag's head and arms. His hair is white and, plastered wet against his head, looks longer than usual. He closes the window behind him against the driving rain, through he is dripping enough water to be a small rain cloud himself. "Hi," he says, waving with just the tips of his fingers, then looks down at the water pooling in and around his shoes. "Um...sorry. It is very wet outside." "Jesus /Christ/," Hive's interjection is more emphatic than Dusk's when that lightning silhouettes Tag out on the fire escape. It comes with a heavy press of distinctly uncomfortable mental pressure, reflexively reaching out to the dark figure outside in tightly squeezing investigation; it pulls back quickly afterwards once the figure is identified as familiar. "Yeah," he grumbles, when Tag comes in, "no fucking shit." He's peeling out of his clothes already. Stooping to unstay his boots, tugging off his shirt and jeans to bundle them in a sodden heap and truck them into the bathroom to drape them on the shower curtain rod to dry. "Yeah, shit, I would suck a fucking cock for hot chocolate. Maybe not yours. Tag, you in?" He returns in only boxers soaked and sticking to his skin, a towel draped over his arm. Though he's peeling the boxers off as well en route to his room, presumably to dry off. "Heyyy, Tag!" Dusk is not facing the window, looking towards Hive instead; he is spared the horror movie imagery, turning only after Hive's exclamation to look towards the opening window. He sets his laptop aside /now/, getting up to get /Tag/ a towel. "You -- uh, want some dry clothes? They'll be a little big but. Won't /stick/ to you." Tag has stepped out of his shoes, which actually contain standing water. He is bouncing up and down just a bit, but remains in one spot as if for fear of inundating the rest of the apartment. His eyes restlessly track Hive, vier away when he undresses, then lock onto Dusk. "Oh! Um, I would love to have some hot chocolate." He hugs himself. "Also, maybe. Clothes. Most clothes are a little big for me." "Have you considered growing?" Hive suggests, from the bedroom. "I mean, you're really small, dude." There is the sound of drawers opening and closing. "What about food, man, when did you last eat." There's a beat before he clarifies: "Something that's /actual/ food not. Like. Pills." "I think he's /mostly/ past the window for growing." Dusk tosses a clean towel to Tag, disappearing into the /other/ bedroom to do his own drawer-rummaging. "I -- think? Actually I have no idea," he suddenly realizes, "Tag could still be a teenager for all I know. -- Hey, Tag, have you considered growing?" He returns with jeans and a blue t-shirt -- it has an image on the front of a glass jar with breathing holes punched in its screwtop, with the /Serenity/ caught inside the jar. Inwardly, there's a sharp fierce twinge of ache as he offers these clothes over to Tag -- pilfered from Ian's largely untouched belongings, his clothing the smallest of any of the apartment's residents. "What're you up to?" Tag accepts the towel with a quiet 'thank you' and starts drying his hair. "I was too busy /studying/ to grow," he replies matter-of-factly from beneath the towel. "Now I cannot seem to actually grow up. Like Peter Pan. Except with less flying." He chews on one of his knuckles and frowns. "I know I ate /yesterday/, Mel made me. This morning I was gonna get something from Happy Cakes, but some guys had wrecked the shop and beat up Hanna and Jayna. Not while I was there. Over the weekend. I may have eaten something /with/ the pills, I'm not sure." Towel wrapped around his shoulders as if it could actually suck the water out of his shirt, Tag is more shivering than bouncing by the time Dusk arrives with dry clothing. "Thank you," he says again, but looks slightly perplexed, as if he does not know what to do with clothes that are not already on his body. Inwardly, he is not so much confused as embarrassed and just a little bit horrified. "I would like to please I need to borrow your bathroom," he blurts, and is dashing off before he even finishes wrecking the doomed sentence. "Need fairy dust for the flying. You should talk to Jax about that." The news about Happy Cakes compresses Hive's lips into a thin line. "That place is really shittily named. You /should/ eat I'm ordering food. You want Korean, I am craving some bibimbap." His brows furrow as Tag rabbits off. << Dude -- >> Hive's mental voice is as abrasive as ever, a harsh sawtoothed grate across the surface of Tag's mind. For all this, what /tone/ can be read beneath the sudden flash of pain is not harsh but just sort of a bland reassurance. << Do what you're comfortable doing, but everyone in this apartment will give zero fucks. >> Dusk tips forward closer to Tag -- sniffing? at the other man at the mention of pills. << What's he on? >> sounds (kind of /hungrily/) a moment before he actually just asks aloud: "What're you on?" His eyebrows raise as Tag dashes off. "Woah uh you know you're free to use the bathroom any time." He takes a step back, and then turns to head towards the kitchen to put a pot of almond milk on the stove. "I am so down for Korean." Tag return a minute later in dry clothes, though his hair--blazing purple now--still looks damp. "I am not really hungry. Hot chocolate is fine. I kind of just want something warm." << And I know nobody cares. I wish /I/ didn't care. But I do. >> He opens the window just long enough to dump the water out of his shoes, then pads over to set them next to the door. Then he drifts toward the kitchen, stopping just outside of it so that he does not get in Dusk's way. "Amphetamines," he replies belatedly, watching the almond milk as though it were exceptionally interesting, or as if he could make it boil faster by willing it. "There's always more of it around at the beginning of summer. Students sell theirs cuz they don't need it anymore." << Don't fucking eat that, dude, you have no /idea/ where it's been, >> Hive's voice is just as abrasive when he speaks to Dusk as it had been to Tag. He has reappeared in the door of the bedroom, now in ragged jeans with holes worn through the knees and a black shirt reading 'resistance is futile (if <1 ohm)'. "Yeah summer is supposed to be for lemonade but fuck this shit. Thunderstorms are for hot chocolate. I watched it start from way a dozen stories up on some scaffolding but that's -- not ideal. Even if it looks incredible." << Yeah, >> this time it is to Tag again, << s'cool. Wasn't trying to make you feel like you /had/ to -- anything, just. Even my fucking Mormon roommate is chill as hell. >> There's a beat, before, aloud instead if mentally he adds half to himself: "... I guess hell's sort of the /opposite/ of chill." << Smells good, >> Dusk complains, frowning down at the pot of almond milk. "Hey, my parents used to give /me/ those when I was in school! Best thing about parents, really. Steady supply of speed. I was too young to appreciate it, though." He turns from the stove, stretching a wing up to pull a cabinet door open, reaching in with a hand to pull out a tin of cocoa and then a bag of sugar. "Who fucked up Happy Cakes?" he revisits older topic, with a tightening knot of something angry-unhappy in his mind. "-- Maaan if you'd gotten hit by lightning I would have /mocked you/ at your funeral." Tag leans against the wall and hugs himself. "I like storms. Used to sit out and watch them on the porch when I lived in the south where people have more porches. Or /verandas/ or whatever. But I was wired, so I just ran around in it until I got tired. Scaffolding is awesome for climbing." He turns back to watch Dusk work. "No wonder I don't get on with my parents. They never gave me the good drugs." He chews on his lower lip for a moment before answering. "Just three random guys. I don't think anyone knows. I mean, the police haven't exactly been super excited about even intervening in anti-mutant violence, much less investigating it." "I don't know if that's really the best metric of effective parenting," Hive says, but then reconsiders: "... though I dunno it seems to work out OK for Jax." He rubs his towel through his hair, leaving it a little dryer and a lot fuzzier, then tosses the damp towel over onto his bed, heading out to the living room to move Dusk's laptop to the floor and steal his chair. "The police have been /doing/ a lot of the fucking anti-mutant violence, of course they give no shits." "I don't think Jax /gets/ the kids drugs," Dusk muses, "though, uh, he'd probably be /smarter/ about it than --" His brow furrows, knuckles scrubbing against his eye as brief thoughts of Shelby flit through his mind. He grabs a fork from a drawer and then just returns to watching the pot. It's not doing anything very exciting. "The police --" He doesn't continue this line though his mind does, finishing with sharp anger: << are the ones who /should/ be dying out there. >> His wings flutter at his back, his fingers drumming restlessly against the top of the cocoa tin. "Most parts of cities are pretty good for climbing," he adds, in a lighter tone that in no way matches the hazy red tinge to his thoughts. "That's why I paint over their windows any chance I get," Tag says, a flash of uncharacteristic anger lancing through his disordered thoughts like the lightning still intermittently visibly outside. "Not my parents, I don't want to be anywhere /near/ them. The cops." He frowns. "Okay, well, I don't want to be anywhere near /them/, either, but since I can't really avoid them anyway..." He shrugs. From his body language, one might think he was discussing his morning commute. "That's true, but scaffolding is easier than most. Also...you don't really need to climb, 'cuz you can just fly, right?" "Man, I think the freaks I'm friends with who /do/ still talk to their parents are in the minority. I don't know if my friends are /extra/ fucked up or if freaks just have a really shitty track record with blood-families." Hive tips his head back against the arm of the chair, looking upside-down over towards the others at the kitchen. His eyebrows raise. "You do what to the cops?" His eyes cut sideways to Dusk instead. "-- Yeah. They kind of all do. They wouldn't /let/ me after the fucking fight ring though and /now/ it'd just churn this bloodbath up even worse." "Paint over their windows? You should paint over their fucking /eyes/," Dusk's light tone has crumbled away, just sharper and more irritable now; its timed with a sharper rise in the anger in his mind, too. His head shakes, wings flexing again. "Don't /need/ to climb. But I don't /need/ to do a lot of things; s'still fun -- Hive, I don't think there's any fucking thing any of us can /do/ that won't mess this shit up worse. We might as well just stop lying down and goddamn /taking it/." "I can do that," Tag's reply is quiet, but not at all tentative. He is certain, and that certainty rises out of guilt and terror. "I just...hadn't thought about doing it, except in self-defense. Or other-defense." He chews on his lip. "They're pretty much either hurting us or /complicit/ in hurting us, so in the general sense fighting them /is/ defense. That's...basically /war/, right?" "Not a war I want to be on the fucking front lines of, man, going up against cops leads to nowhere but dead." Hive shakes his head, letting his eyes close with his head still dangling downward. "Though I guess it's a war that needs to be fought. It's just no one that's going to end anywhere good. I mean, what's the end game here? There gonna be a big fucking bonfire, cops and freaks sitting around holding hands and singing kumbaya?" Dusk's jaw tightens. His eyes shift, first towards Tag's borrowed clothes and then towards the far bedroom door. "They're hurting us," he says through clenched fangy teeth. Amid anger he has neglected to pay attention to his pot of milk; in the manner of milk, it goes from barely simmering to bubbling over in a matter of seconds. His attention shifts back downwards with the spit-hiss of liquid spilling down into the gas flame. "Fuck," he mutters, turning the heat down to low. "End game?" His head shakes. He tips the cocoa tin over the pot, shaking out some of the powder with eyeball-measuring, and then a roughly equal portion of sugar. "Is there an end game, here. I don't know. They kill us or we kill them." "Wars like this..." Tag starts, but does not finish the thought aloud because it ends in the still image of one man standing in front of a column of tanks. "If we fight the cops right here, right now? It's not gonna stay between us and them. Those guys who trashed Happy Cakes didn't give a fuck if Hanna was a mutant or not. If I hoodwinked every cop in the City, you know there's plenty of nutjobs with guns who are gonna go all militia." Tag slides down against the wall until he is sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking tiny and lost. "It's not quite us against the world, but do you really think we can /win/ that?" "Nope." Hive's answer is prompt and so optimistic. Bland-blunt-quick. "You'll die trying." "But we'll die /trying/," Dusk answers, picking up the fork to whisk at the cocoa rather more vigorously than is really necessary. "And we're going to die either way. Might as well start evening the odds for those who come after." "I don't want to die." Tag addresses this largely to his bare feet. "I am not brave enough. I can pass, mostly, so it's easier to just keep playing 'normal'. But I don't want to stand by and let other people get killed, either, waiting for the rest of the world to suddenly grow a conscience. Or a spine." He falls silent, pulls his knees up to his chest. "I guess I need to grow a conscience or a spine myself." "Bad combination," Hive discourages this idea. "Having a conscious /and/ a backbone just makes you do /stupid/ fucking shit. Be a wimp. Be a heartless bastard. You'll live a fuckton longer." Dusk huffs out a long breath through his nose. "Probably right," he agrees with Hive's discouragement wryly, "but." His wings stretch, flexing out but running into kitchen walls before managing to reach full extension. He pulls them back to fold them against his shoulders. He stirs the chocolate some more, then goes to rummage through the cabinets -- he comes up with /one/ clean mug, and moves to start washing two others from the large pile of dishes in the sink. "I don't need to be brave. I just don't really have a choice." << And they've already taken everything anyway, >> is a thought coloured more with cloudy-dark shadow than with the previous angry red haze. "Since when have heartless cowards been wise?" Tag presses gently, mumbling into his folded arms. Maybe the drugs are wearing off and his misadventures catching up with him, but his eyes start sliding shut. When he slumps too far to one side, he starts awake and shakes his head like a wet dog. "/Tsemu...?/ Oh, right. I was going to say something, but I forget what." He blinks his eyes clear and looks up at Dusk. "I think. It is pretty brave to just be alive." "I don't know. Every motherfucker ever born's managed being alive. It's pretty much the bare minimum required." Hive bares his teeth up at the ceiling, still from his upside-down position; it's not really a smile but it comes close. "Pfft. Heartless cowards tend to have pretty strong self-preservation instincts. Those come in handy. You want to fucking sleep, dude? /You/ could stand to learn some self-preservation, you don't need to be a heartless coward to still take care of yourself." Dusk turns off the stove, setting the mugs down on the counter to pour the cocoa into them. Maybe also a little bit onto the counter, his aim is not perfect. He shifts down closer to Tag, stretching out a wing to curl it snug and soft around the smaller man's shoulders as he offers one of the mugs. "I think --" Inside this finishes with a hot fierce flare of emotions; a sharp stab of anger, a sharper /wrench/ of grief that has not, actually, managed to get any /quieter/ in the weeks since Ian's death -- just harder, more /clarified/ by his recent stretch of actually staying fed. Outside, just quiet. His wing brushing gently against Tag's shoulder. "I think you should have some chocolate, and have some rest." Tag makes a face like someone who has just bitten into a lemon for the first time. "Maybe, being alive is not exactly the same as living. I dunno, I bullshitted my way through philosophy class. And I do not want to sleep." His body disputes this claim by yawning. "Hot chocolate will wake me up." He leans on Dusk, accepting the mug with with hand and hugging him with his free arm, beneath the warm envelopment of the huge wing. "Maybe...I will rest until the rain stops. Then. Go do stuff." "Stuff?" Hive's brows raise. He unrolls himself from the armchair, thudding down onto the floor before getting back to his feet. He pads past the others into the kitchen, bringing the other two mugs down to the floor. He sets one down in front of Dusk, closing his eyes and tipping his head forward to rest against Dusk's, for a moment. No words, just a heavy /press/ of mental presence that settles in a blanket weight against Dusk's mind, and then withdraws. "Think everyone might do good with some rest." Dusk's other wing unfurls, curling up and around Hive, as well. He doesn't say anything. He curls his fingers around his mug, gripping tight. He is slow to lift it to his lips, letting his eyes close as he drinks. Focusing on more tactile feelings; the sweet hot of the chocolate, the warmth of the others tucked under his wings. It doesn't really do a lot to quell the other feelings, but it does give him something to think about /instead/. He squeezes them gently, and then just drinks.