ArchivedLogs:Fanboys

Fanboys
Dramatis Personae Cage, Lucien, Matt
In Absentia	2013-06-05 '
Location <NYC> Home - Greenwich Village
Nestled into the heart of the Village, Home is an unobtrusive place, with an unobtrusive name to match. A nondescript storefront opens up into an equally nondescript cafe, plain tiled floors, an assortment of veneered tables with plain wooden chairs or booths with cracking vinyl benches. What it /does/ have to recommend it is the food, hearty solid breakfast and brunch served twenty-four hours a day. Known to locals and little frequented by tourists, its friendly serving staff tend to remember their regulars, giving the place a warm feel that lives up to its name. A little too late for lunch, a little too early for dinner, the crowd scattered around this diner is a desultory mix. A couple of college-aged men in a corner booth ignoring each other in favour of their iPhones, an elderly woman at a table near the room's center in company of two young children, a woman in a business suit hastily downing a plate of French toast at a table by herself. Near the window, a pair of men sit. One of them -- taller, well-muscled, blond hair the kind of disheveled that suggests he took a good deal of /time/ making it look like he just got out of bed -- is not talking. He is frowning at a phone in his hand like it has offended him. He's dressed nicely even in casual wear, his slim-fit jeans tailored to his form, his short-sleeved henley shirt a deep green to accentuate his vividly emerald eyes. The other -- shorter, paler, intensely skinny -- has more /casual/ to his casual. Lightweight cargo pants and a red t-shirt with Calvin and Hobbes riding the Millennium Falcon. Even in the summer-like heat he is wearing a green knit cap pulled down around his ears, and his shirt hangs loosely on his thin shoulders. /He/ is smiling, though, toying with his menu and keeping up a stream of chatter in a cheerful blend of French and English that seems oblivious to or unaffected by his partner's sullen mood. "{-- those posters /everywhere/ now but, oh my God did you /see/ that boy with the tail, I don't even want to /know/ how much they paid him for that.} Or maybe I do! What would /your/ price b -- oh /man/ should I even be asking that?" He sounds amused at his own not-really-joke. "{I don't really know why they're bothering does anyone actually think it's even} a /question/ at this point?" Already a big man, now with a metabolism to fuel his mutation, Luke Cage visits a lot of restaurants, and its a good thing he's not paycheck-to-paycheck anymore. He's a in a new-money suit, slick gray, with a pale yellow button up shirt, but no tie. It looks like the suit was not just made for him, but actually constructed /on/ him. It's not /tight/ it just could not possibly fit any better. Luke sniffs and nods as he looks around the place. His ear twitches when he hears the guys speaking something other than 'Merican over there. He rolls his eyes, and shrugs. That's New York for you. Takes all types. The hostess is held up briefly before coming out from the back. There's a flurry of whispers as one server explains who he is, and demands he not be in her section, which Cage pretends not to hear. The other server just shrugs, so the hostess finally comes out, plasters on a smile, and seats Cage in the booth across from the Frenchies. He picks up his menu and begins to scan. "{It has never been a question}," Lucien finally deigns to answer his brother, switching back to (quietly francophone-accented) English to continue: "The question is what they will do with it afterwards." His brother has no accent when he switches languages. "Oh my god, I /know/ you." This is to Cage, every bit as cheerful-bright as he's been when speaking to Lucien. When he shifts it is all the more obvious that he is not sitting in one of the diner's chairs, having displaced it in favour of a wheelchair. The body and wheels of the chair have thin strands of lights traced out along them, though in the bright daytime lighting it does not have quite the same effect -- even /so/ the tracery turns his chair into a Tron lightcycle of wheelchairs. "Hey, Luci, that's --" Lucien flicks a glance over to Cage, then drops it back to his phone. "I know who that is." He doesn't sound near so eager as his brother. Matt is pushing his chair away from the table, over towards Cage's booth. It's a slow process; his stick-thin arms don't really seem well equipped for this self-propulsion. Lucien does not get up to help. "/Hi/, you're -- can I have," Matt is starting; Lucien interrupts (still from his seat) with a dry: "Let the man eat his lunch, Matt." "Oh, it's ok," Cage says, smiling broadly at both men. Cage may be a lot of things, he is /not/ one to deny a sick kid in a wheelchair. He turns sideways in his booth letting his legs stick out into the aisle and puts his hand out to shake when Matt rolls up. He is extra gentle with the hand shake, starkly aware of the fragile hand in his thick paw. "Hi, I'm Luke," he says, his eyes flick to see if Matt has something for him to sign, but come back to make eye contact again. "How's it goin, bud?" Matt's smile brightens still further at this. He shakes Luke's hand happily, his own skinny-bony fingers clammy-cold in Luke's hand. "Hi! I'm Matt. /That's/ Luci. I met you," he confides in Luke, even as he is squirming around to turn -- there is a backpack hung off the back of his wheelchair that he is tugging around into his lap. He produces a Sharpie from it first! "Well, ok, I didn't /meet/ you --" He is rummaging in the bag for, perhaps, Something To Sign. "Matt." Lucien is a little bit sharper, this time. There is a waiter at their table now! Waiting! Although this might not be the cause for the sharpness because Lucien happily just orders for Matt: French toast with strawberries; for himself, a spinach-tomato-cheese omelette. Side of home fries. Cranberry juice for Matt, carrot for himself. "My brother," he tells Luke with kind of /tried/ patience, "is what you might call a fan." He says this like a criticism. "It's alright," Luke says, laughing off Lucien's concern. "It beats the alternative," most likely meaning 'hostile'. Apparently 'not being recognized' is an unfamiliar concept for the man. There was a quirk of his brow at Matt's introduction of Lucien. He gets that brow under control pretty quickly, but it happened. He was in prison a long time, and it's taken much effort on his part to catch up with the acceptance and language of today. It helps that he's an equal rights activist, which has included him coming to accept sexual orientations, but the old-fashioned guy from Harlem still stumbles over a boy named Sue, or Lucy, in this case. "Uh, hey, nice to meet you both. Lucy. Matt." It's his turn with the waiter then. He orders a coffee, and two orders of that ridiculous breakfast pictured on the front of the menu. "Oh, are you meeting someone else?" The waiter asks. "Nah man, I'm just /hungry/. Don't worry, I'll pay for two orders, ok?" He claps the waiter on the shoulder, who is very nearly at eye level with sitting-Luke while standing next to him. Luke turns back to Matt, totally focused. "So, look, I'm an asshole," he says, smiling, "I really can't remember where we met man, I'm sorry. Can you remind me?" There is a slight quirk of Lucien's lips, thin, brief, timed with that quirk of eyebrow. He glances back to his phone. "Luci doesn't like fun," Matt confides to Luke like a terrible secret, "or joy or, well, smiling, he's not really a /fan/ of anything." He ends up returning -- triumphant! -- from his dive into his backpack with a copy of this week's Time magazine! HUMAN FIRST? reads the cover; it features a photograph of a young woman in a crisp Naval uniform and a serious expression looking out from her wheelchair. "I do not like," Lucien answers crisply, "idiots." He gives the magazine a /look/ as Matt extends it and the Sharpie to Luke with a /flourish/. "Come /on/," Matt protests, sort of grinning as he looks from the magazine cover photograph of Elliott up to Luke, "it's /funny/. -- You're not an asshole," he is quick to assure Luke, "I'm pretty forgettable. We met --" "In Harlem," Lucien cuts in, tone shifting back to quiet-dry. "Forgetting is understandable, it must command a good deal of your attention parading about all the time." "Yeah, I know, right?" Luke says to Lucien. He gets that Lucien is the surly one with these two, but apparently he thinks 'Lucy' is referring to these HUMAN FIRST idiots, and not himself. Luke is inclined to try and warm up to the surly one. Luke frowns a little, trying to remember, and finally does the politician's trick, of the smile and nod. He doesn't actually /say/ he remembers, just technically acknowledges that Lucien Said Something. Yes he did! "You'd be surprised," he says to Lucien's remark about strutting. "Sometimes it takes a parade. Or a march." Taking it in stride is better than getting mad. Besides, he was more interested now in just being nice to Matt. He takes the magazine and the pen, looks at Matt and winks before drawing a circle with line through it over the mutant's face, like the no-smoking sign. Underneath he writes, 'HUMAN TOO', and signs his name. "Oh, man, /thanks/!" Matt's smile is bright-bright-bright as he takes the magazine back, holding it up to show it to Lucien like a /prize/. "Sorry, I'm sure you get this all the /time/. It's just so -- it's not often you see stories of someone who --" "Does it help?" Lucien cuts in over Matt's gushing. "Parades. Marches. Flouncing about seeking attention. I am all for attention when it is /productive/. Do you think it has all /done/ much to, ah." His eyes lift for a moment as though searching the ceiling for the end to this thought. "Further your people's /cause/?" "Hey, no worries, Matt," Luke says, still sitting at the edge of the booth. "But uh, which of 'my people' are we talking about, boss?" He's smiling and good natured. He waits through the server dropping off his plates of food, gets everything organized on the table the way he likes, and starts adding cream and sugar to his coffee. Lots of it. Without looking over at Lucien, he asks, "We talking 'the African-Americans'? Prisoner's rights? Or maybe you meant someone else. The suffragettes? Or the gays? Yeah man, I'd say marching works out pretty well. Better than hiding in the shadows, waiting to be nabbed for doing nothing wrong." Still all smiles, maybe just a little strained though. "Mutants," Lucien says, apparently not inclined much to beating around any bushes. "How well is marching working for /them/?" Matt winces, slipping his magazine and Sharpie back into his backpack. /Their/ food is sitting ignored on their table, now. He slowly pushes his lightcycle-chair back, slightly. "It's early, yet," he answers Lucien quietly. "People," Lucien answers with a thin smile, "do not see your kind of antics and think that they should be blessing mutants with an abundance /more/ rights. They see it and think, dear God, they are too dangerous to go unchecked. Because for every one of you they remember there are a dozen more like Magneto." Luke chuckles and nods. "S'actly what my publicist has been sayin'. You two must work out at the same gym or somethin'." He nods at Matt and says, "Hey, why don't you two join me. Then we don't have to keep talking across the aisle here." The end of Luke's table would be perfect for a roll-up like Matt's, and there's a whole other bench for Lucien, if they like the idea. Luke sets about rearranging his plates. Luke sips at his coffee, and says, "I mean, yeah, I get what you're saying. The equal rights issues... they were just stuck in old ways. Those 'uppity women' and what-not weren't exactly shootin' lasers out their eyes, huh?" Luke stirs a drink that can only nominally be called coffee at this point. The amount of cream and sugar in it has noticeably raised the liquid level. "But what do I do? Let a building fall on a bunch a' people? It's just not how I'm wired, man. I mean, I /get/ it. People remember the prison break, and yeah. Can't get that off a' youtubes now. But I dunno man. Seems like its worth while to show people not /all/ of us are nutjobs like Magneto." "People do seem awfully fond of comparing mutants' issues to previous civil rights struggles, but, yes. It is not an apt comparison. As far as I know, being black does not endow you with the power to enter someone's mind and bend it to your will." Lucien finally turns to his food, lifting his juice to take a sip. "Worth while? People dislike vigilantes whether they are mutants or no." "There's a thin line between vigilante and hero," Matt protests. He rocks his chair a little back more towards Lucien's table but stops at Luke's invitation, turning large hopeful eyes on Lucien at this. Lucien makes no move to shift tables. "Have you tried listening to your publicist? There are many ways to sway public opinion. Grandstanding is not high among them." He glances from Matt to Cage with a quiet huff of breath, exasperated though the twitch of his lips is amused. /He/ pulls his phone out of his pocket as Matt happily notches himself in at Lucien's table, no doubt settling in to chatter the other man's ear off as his /brother/ settles back into antisociability.