ArchivedLogs:At Stake

At Stake
Dramatis Personae Dusk, Ion, Isra	2013-10-25 '
Location <NYC> Busboys and Poets - East Harlem
A quiet, artsy spot nestled away on a side street in East Harlem, Busboys and Poets combines cafe and bookstore in a way a Starbucks tacked on to a Barnes & Noble could never achieve. The food is a solid, multi-national cuisine menu that caters to all kinds of dietary choices, and its fair-trade tea menu is extensive. Its weekend brunch tends to draw a large crowd, but there is ample enough seating both at tables and on its many comfortable armchairs and couches that at other times of the week there is never a wait. The walls are adorned with the work of local artists, and tucked in among and alongside the couches are rows upon rows of books, with a definite slant towards the political and the bohemian. It's one of those awkward slots of day, too late for one meal, too early for another, that make for prime restauranting time if you're looking for places to be /quiet/. Late afternoon, well past lunch rush but with many people still at work; this is when Ion comes to LOUNGE. He's lounging /aggresively/, spread out over most of a couch -- backpack at one end, a couple of magazines in front of him, a small cup of tomato soup and a half of a grilled chicken panini on the table as well. He's dressed casual, jeans, a long-sleeved black t-shirt; his heavily decorated leather jacket is draped over an arm of the chair, its skull-and-crossbones logo (though in his case the crossbones are a pair of lightning bolts instead) half-visible where it is folded. Right now he's on his phone. Playing Snake. Kind of old-school. It's a pretty cheap phone. Outside it's getting chiller; when the door opens it lets in a long brisk draft, made longer by the fact that Dusk holds the door open for his companion before entering himself. He's got a long dark trenchcoat on when he enters, oddly misshapen at the top to lend him a somewhat humpbacked appearance; together with his near-black hair, near-black eyes, unhealthy pallor, he could be pulling off the goth look pretty well. He ruins it shortly after entering by pulling off the trenchcoat, freeing his enormous wings from beneath; his clothes underneath it are bland and boring. Jeans, Vans sneakers, a green-and-white striped v-neck tee. He doesn't head for the counter to place an order, detouring instead towards Ion's seat to drop his arms over the back of the couch, clapping both hands to Ion's shoulders to jostle him, game or no game. "Hey, man, what's up? You remember Isra?" One wing gestures towards her. If Dusk looks goth, his companion looks like a Renaissance Faire runaway. Isra is draped in a double-layered cloak, her wings mostly tucked up beneath the outer, green layer whose generous hood, worn up, does not quite conceal the caprine horns growing up and back from her temples. She sheds this once inside, revealing a lilac Mandarin tunic with red piping and white plum blossoms. Her long skirt is a darker shade of purple, and her feet are wrapped in thick layers of black cohesive bandages. Following Dusk and picking her way to the side of the couch, she inclines her head at Ion. "Good day. We always seem to catch each other in passing, or while occupied with important tasks." "Tch {man fuck you} I was doing so /good/ in that one." Profanity aside, Ion's tone sounds brightly jovial as he is jostled, even with his concentration interrupted and game coming to a quick end. He tips his head back against the couch to look up at Dusk, raising a hand over his head to ruffle up at Dusk's hair. "Boy, you look like a corpse again, it's not a good. You," he glances up to Isra, hand falling away from Dusk's hair to curl into a fist and offer knuckles out to her to TAP, "know if he been eating? /Hah/ important yeah. Don't got people around here to save, pull up a chair, we'll take it /easy/. Our luck though, we all sit down together, this shop will get a bomb." Dusk ducks his head downwards, fangs flashing in a quick grin at his jostling. "How long've you been playing that anyway? Don't you know video games rot your brain and make you prone to killing peopl -- ohshit." He doesn't actually explicate this 'ohshit', just straightens and drapes his trenchcoat over the arm of the couch beside Ion's jacket. "Ugh, nobody better bomb this place before I get some chili and a hit of caffeine." Isra bumps her fist to Ion's, ears twitching what might have been bemusement on a more expressive face. "Not that I have observed--recently, anyhow." She glances at Dusk with a smile that flashes fangs just for a moment. Her tail continues twitching for a while, though, even when she perches herself on the arm of the couch. "We will just have to put a stop to anything of the sort, then. I could do with some coffee myself. Coffee and about..." Her eyes flick up, as if consulting an invisible spreadsheet on the ceiling. "...Thirty-five hundred calories should do it." Then she looks at Ion's tomato soup and sandwich, a hint of doubt in one slightly uplifted eyebrow ridge. "Anything you'd recommend?" Ion taps his knuckles against Isra's with a wide bright grin. He half-turns afterwards, knee tucked up onto the couch and his arm slung over its back. "Oh yeah he's on the right path with the chili, best thing in the house. Got this -- shrimps and chickens thing? With chorizo? And pasta? Oh and there's a cake. Thick rich flourless chocolate thing, must be nothing but chocolate and butter I don't even know. It will calorie you all the calorie -- /you/ on the other hand," he adds after looking Isra over more carefully from this newly turned vantage point, "look gorgeous. Dusk, vato, you need to have /food/. Your lady, she outshines you by far." Dusk glances over towards the counter, nodding absently at Ion's suggestion. "I might go with pesto lasagna. /And/ chili." His wings droop down towards the floor, one of them shifting to one side to brush up against Isra's twitching tail. "You like your coffee any way special?" He leans against the back of the couch, answering Ion's commentary with a smile. "Oh, she'd do that no matter what I did. -- What're /you/ up to here, man?" "I would like to start off with the chili, then, as large a bowl as they offer." Isra glances at the window and the huddled-passers by. "It is the right weather for it. As for coffee, I take it black--usually kind of burnt and excessively strong, too." Her wing unfurls enough to press back against Dusk's. She blinks at the compliment, and tilts her head to one side, searching the two men's faces for something she does not find. "Thank you." This is not demure or shy, just sincere and perhaps a little bit puzzled. "Is getting chill out there," Ion agrees. He leans forward, collecting his magazines into a small tidy stack and setting his plate atop them, nudging his bowl closer in to create plenty of room on the table. He waves his hand towards the other seats in his little corner -- an armchair, a loveseat -- and turns around to face his food again. "Oh, me, I'm slacking. Supposed to watch over my corner of Harlem tonight after fighting's done, yeah? Skipped out work early to take a nap but instead of taking a nap I got," he taps at his soup-cup, "soup. You two throwing down tonight?" "You got Harlem? I'm down in Clinton. Remind me to show you this app I'm working on." Dusk slips around the couch to unclip the strap of his messenger bag from its buckle so he can drop the bag off at one side of the loveseat. "I will throw down with /you/ if you want, boy. But food first." His wing flicks out to bap Ion lightly on the arm, but then he heads up towards the counter to put an order in for himself and Isra. "Throwing down," Isra says, the phrase sounding odd in her impeccably neutral tone, "is why I need thirty-five hundred calories." She settles into the loveseat sidewise, legs tucked under herself and arm draped along the back. Her posture looks kind of languid and almost /seductive/ at first glance, but it is also one of the few ways she can sit on a couch and leave her tail free. "It is curious to think of skipping a nap as 'slacking', especially if you mean to be working later. You will be doing so alone?" Her ears press back against her skull. "Skipping out my job was the slack part." Ion leans forward to pick up his soup, turning his head to call after Dusk, "-- Ey, you could get me also a cider? Hot?" His attention shifts back to Isra afterwards, eyes drifting up along her form to stop at her face. "Why? You want some fight after your fight? Probably be nothing, most nights are nothing. Just the nights that are something, well, people get glad we are there." Dusk puts in the order and pays for the food, returning to the table with a little plastic table-number that he sets down in the center of the table. "I haven't tried the cider. Also pretty much the right time of year for it." He takes up a perch on the arm of the loveseat, wings draped off behind him towards the floor. His eyes slant to Isra, hands resting on his knees. "We always do like help," he murmurs lower. "There have been nights when I should have been glad for it, even in my neighborhood." Isra's eyes hold Ion's, steady and unblinking. "If I am in any kind of shape to do so later, I would like to help." She glances up at Dusk, both eyebrow ridges elevated. "Unless Sensei thinks my training is not yet complete?" A fangy smile follows this, as if to say she would consider any such sentiment a /challenge./ "Oh, man," Ion's hand claps to his thigh, his smile delighted, "I think /I/ am not going to get a chance to take you on tonight, Batman, this sounds like you are going to have a contender all lined /up/." He looks away from Isra, eyebrows raising to Dusk. "She wants to help. She good to help? Because we always can use extra hands." Dusk's lips twitch upwards, thin points of fangs glinting behind his lips. "I don't know. Guess we'll find out tonight." The smile fades at the rest of the talk, though, expression shifting into something more serious. "We can trust her," he answers Ion quietly. "She'll help." His eyes focus down on his hands after this, fingers pressing against his knees. "With everything going on lately we'll need it more than ever. I'm worried that --" He frowns, still quiet when he speaks, low against the permanent background-noise of music playing over the cafe speakers and disparate other conversations scattered haphazardly throughout the room. "-- I'll talk to Regan. Tonight." "I am sure he is equal to more than one fight--unless I demonstrate my competence /too/ well." Isra shrugs a wing at Ion, then looks back up at Dusk. Her ears lower until they are almost parallel with her back-swept horns. She reaches out and covers one of Dusk's hands with hers, long clawed fingers monstrous but gentle--for the moment. "In seriousness, though, I will follow your lead. I know when to be a student and when to be a teacher." "You come fight with us, it's more than his lead you'll be following." Ion lapses into quiet as their drinks come out, Isra and Dusk's coffees and his own hot cider. "You do much fighting? The for-real kind, not in our little --" His finger waves in a circle in the air. "Get-togethers. The kind where when you put people down they /stay/ down." Dusk's fingers press down against his knee, hand tensing up under Isra's touch before he slowly turns it over, fingers curling back around hers. He leans forward, other hand reaching for his steaming coffee -- flavoured, it looks chocolatey and smells like mint -- and takes a small tentative sip. "We've had this talk. Sometimes you do what you need to do." He flicks a glance to Ion, lips pressing together. "That man from the church," he tells Ion. "In the truck. He's going to come back. Probably soon." "Never." Isra's fingers close around Dusk's hand, talons digging in lightly. "I have hunted--deer, mostly--and I have sparred. I am aware of the differences." Cat green eyes stray to Dusk again, suddenly, if briefly, fierce and tender. Her voice drops so low that the alto falls away entirely and leaves only the ominous rumbling bass. "I know what's at stake." Ion's teeth flash again at this, brief and thin. "Maaan, do you? 'Cause I never really know what's at stake till I've lost it. But a lot, that's for damn sure." He dips his head, slurping at his soup straight from the cup and ignoring the spoon. "Back? Back where back for what I mean there's shit-all at the church now, brother. I didn't imagine he just up-and-vanished, though." "Not the church. Our home, probably. For Jax --" Dusk hesitates, eyes skimming the room though his voice is still quiet enough against the background noise not to carry far. "-- and for another -- one of our labrats this time is --" His fingers squeeze Isra's hand tighter, heedless of the talons. "-- Dangerous. Dangerous enough they really want him back. I don't know what's at stake either, this time. Might be more than we're equipped to handle." Ion's eyes fall to Isra and Dusk's hand. Lift again, as their food arrives. He sits back in his chair with his cup, shrugging one shoulder in a quick hitch. "Have you /met/ us, vato? Between all of our people, we can handle a lot."