ArchivedLogs:More Waiting

More Waiting
Dramatis Personae Dusk, Micah, Doug	19 February 2014 Laundry talk gets a little heavy.
Location <NYC> Village Lofts - Laundry Room - East Village
This laundry room looks as many laundry rooms do. Fluorescent lights a little too-bright, linoleum floor is chipping, lint-dusty and occasionally stained sticky with spilled detergent. A broom and dustpan in one corner encourage its users to contribute to its cleanliness, which they do with intermittent conscientiousness. A bank of quarter-fed washing machines along the wall have clear windows on their doors to watch the laundry spin and turn within. On the wall opposite, a matching row of dryers near-perpetually has at least one out of commission. A rickety folding table and chairs at one side provide a place to sit and wait. There's a dispenser on the wall that will provide single-use sized packets of detergent or fabric softener, but it is hit or miss whether it is ever in stock. The laundry room is snug and warm, the tumbling dryers filling it with a pleasantly fabric-softener-scented heat. Snug and warm means that Dusk even outside his apartment is /still/ not bothering with trivialities such as Shirts (nobody ever accused him of having anything like a sense of modesty), though he has put on his old Vans sneakers to pair with his equally old faded brown corduroys for the trip down here. There's a laundry hamper by the table beside him, currently a quarter filled with folded clothes; the table has its own share of laundry, clean and, at least nominally, in the process of being folded. Not that Dusk is actually bothering with any folding just at the moment. Presumably at /some/ point he was actually folding his laundry; he's since been distracted again by his laptop, which sits on the table beside the pile of laundry. He's perched kneeling on a chair which sits backwards at the table, leaning over with one arm draped against the chair's back and one hand resting on the mousepad. Intermittently his hand moves from mousepad to a gunmetal-grey stainless-steel thermos beside him, lifting it to take small sips and then return the thermos to the table. His wings droop in lazy blanketing down against his back, black eyes fixed on the screen; /he's/ facing the door, currently, laptop screen not visible from the entrance. Micah seems to be in the right place, for all he has a laundry bag on his back, held there with a convenient cross-body strap. Beneath he wears his usual Batsignal hoodie, bleach stained xkcd 'Stand Back I'm Going to Try Science!' T-shirt, and patchy jeans. His hair has a typical late-in-the-day muss. Upon spotting Dusk, Micah heads his way, setting his bag on the ground instead of immediately going to sort its contents into machines. "Hey, honey, how are you?" One hand reaches out to pet at the outside of Dusk's leg. "Old corduroy kind of /asks/ t'be petted at," he observes before tilting his head slightly. "Y'seen Hive lately? He seem t'be doin' okay?" For once, Doug finds himself home early on a weeknight, which means that things he's been neglecting are getting tended to. Things like laundry, which he's currently hauling in a basket, a bottle of laundry soap and a tablet perched on top. Dressed in jeans and a snug-fitting white tank top, the blonde has the basket braced against one hip, allowing him to look at his phone while he enters the laundry room. His thumb skims over the screen as he moves to the machines, obviously unaware that there's a Dusk or Micah currently in residence. He drops his basket next to the machine, chuckling as he taps out something on the screen and sending it before sliding it into his back pocket. Only then does he realize there are other people there, and he turns swiftly, his eyes widening slightly. "Oh, hell. I didn't even..." he blushes, and shakes his head apologetically. "I get lost, sometimes, when I'm working with a device." Which isn't much of an apology, really, so he wrinkles his nose and tries again. "How are you guys doing?" "Do you know how many times Jax has re-upholstered the fucking furniture in your apartment?" Dusk has to all outward appearances ignored the entrance of another person into the room, but he tips his head up at the comment on corduroy, giving Micah a sharp-toothed grin as one wing (healed, now, so neatly it'd be difficult to even see the very thin tracing of scarring beneath its soft fuzz) slips out to curl gently around the older man in a soft squeeze as he is petted. "Because holy shit does corduroy /not/ fucking last around the pups." He tabs out of the browser window he's been looking at, leaving Gunnerkrigg Court open on the screen instead. "They seem to think it's a scratching post. On people or off. On furniture or off." His wing squeezes in tighter at the question of Hive. "-- Yeah. Um. About that. We should probably talk. I mean, we had a talk last night and he --" He flicks his eyes up as Doug enters, brows lifting. "... are you apologizing for coming to do laundry, dude?" He sounds puzzled. "Ohgosh, yeah. It's not /even/ like havin' unruly cats with untrimmed claws. S'like keepin' /tigers/," Micah says with a chuckle, continuing to pet at the corduroy for a little bit before switching over to petting Dusk's wing. "Wing's lookin' good. Healed up nice. Y'been able t'fly on it again?" He chews on his lip at Dusk's answer regarding Hive. "Did he finally...tell /somebody/ somethin'? He keeps just tryin' t'eat m'brain an' then sayin' he doesn't know how t'say anythin'. An' implyin' like he's gonna die. An' not /sayin'/ anythin'. I don't wanna push 'im, but it's startin' t'make me a little crazy." Micah quiets as the door opens again. "Hey, Doug." The greeting comes with a small wave of the hand /not/ engaged in petting. "Okay. Just...comin' down t'get some laundry started." "No," Doug says to Dusk, making a face at the other man before he turns back to the machines, bending to begin sorting his laundry. "I was apologizing for being one of those people who ignore the world around them for the phone in their hand." He lifts a shoulder, and chooses two machines on the end to receive his haphazard sorting. "I mean, it /is/ kind of rude." One machine gets sheets and towels; the other everything else. "What are you guys talking about?" He asks, glancing over his shoulder to offer a teasing grin. "The merits of dryer sheets versus liquid softeners?" "Is it?" Dusk sounds puzzled about this, too. "Not like you bumped into us. Or were even in the middle of a conversation or -- I mean, dude, I live in a house with a bunch of nerds, it's pretty much strange if everyone /doesn't/ have a screen in front of their face half the time. I mean, I guess my /grandmother/ might think it was rude but I pretty much take it for granted everyone's tethered to some kinda mobile device somewhere." He flicks a thumbclaw down at the laptop in front of him, amused. "So you're apologizing to me for looking at your phone while I'm on my laptop. Got it." He's caught up, apparently, on Gunnerkrigg because now he's tabbed over to Oglaf, which he is from the look of it quite a few episodes behind on. "I don't feel very rude myself, though." His wing squeezes around Micah again, brushing down slowly against the other man's back. "Unruly tigers?" he answers Doug's final question with a small lift of his eyebrows. "And the pettability of corduroy. -- Haven't tried flying yet, but it's healed well. Just been too damn /cold/ to get out and stretch it much. And things at home have been --" Another slow squeeze. His finger hovers over the keypad, slowly scrolling down through the comic. "Had a really long talk last night," he says softly. "He asked me and Flicker to tell people for him, he's not really -- feeling up to talking about it much yet. Like because it's not a secret. It's just a hard thing to have a conversation about." When Doug mentions being rude for playing with his tablet, Micah gestures at Dusk's laptop with a thumb and a lopsided grin. "An' I'm pretty much /always/ attached to a device," he jokes, tapping his left knee. Not that this particular device seems to be demanding much of his attention. "Yeah, it's been gross outdoors. Guess that also means y'haven't been missin' out on any flyin' time on account of the injury, either, which is good in a way." He simply nods at further talk of hive. "Okay. S'just...I'm sure my imagination's worse'n whatever it is. An' the longer I go without knowin' nothin', the more...intricate an' horrible the speculations become. Is all." Doug blushes when Dusk calls him out, and lifts a shoulder as he finishes sorting his laundry and reaches for the bottle of soap. "I guess I've just got my mom's voice in my head lately," he says. "And she's real big on the proper way to behave around other people. Appearances, and all that." There's the smallest bitterness in his voice as he says this, and his jaw sets just the tiniest bit. "But point taken." He manages a grin as he dumps soap into the machines, although it fades pretty quickly. "I heard about your mugging-turned-brawl," he says to Dusk, his brow knitting in concern. "I didn't know you'd gotten hurt like that, though." He frowns deeper as he puts the rest of the conversation together. "What's going on with Hive? Is he sick or something?" Dusk's smile curves back sharp and wickedly amused; he glances down, at his bare chest, at the wing half draped around himself. "Tch, well, I'm /pretty/ much fucked for /appearances/ no matter what I do. So I think I gave up that battle long ago." The mention of mugging has him moving a hand to his side; there where there's no dark fuzzy fur and the skin heals less quickly than the more injury-prone (but faster-to-heal) membrane of his wings the thin red line of scarring against his side is still visible, though it too is well healed in a way it really shouldn't be for an injury that was deep and probably really /should/ have warranted stitches on most people only last week. He shrugs a shoulder, swiping his thermos off the table to take another sip. "Eh, it was nothing. Some woman with a bow and arrow." He taps the lip of the thermos against his teeth, closing the lid of his laptop and pushing it aside. He takes another drink from the thermos, setting it down in front of Micah so that he can reach into his pile of clothing, swipe a t-shirt to resume folding. "He's been dealing with some health shit, yeah. -- Wait, what are you speculating?" His brows lift, eyes fixing on Micah with a sudden /morbid/ curiosity. "He had some pretty /spectacular/ injuries," Micah confirms, giving Dusk's wing a last pet before moving aside to drag his laundry bag over to a machine. "Tell me you're not still fantasizin' about archer lady." One corner of his mouth tugs upward in amusement at the prospect as he starts separating clothes into two machines by a really general heavy/light algorithm. "Y'don't wanna know what I been speculatin'. I got a medical background. Worst possible place t'come from when you've got a sickness goin' on an' no real data about it. Opens whole new /worlds/ of worry." Doug doesn't look particularly mollified by the explanation, and he frowns mightily as he fishes in his pocket for quarters. "Huh. Looks like they were pretty bad," he says, his brow lowering. "Damn. I really need to spend more time around the building," he says, shaking his head at the news about Hive. He slides the coins into the slots, and starts the machines before he turns to hop up on one. "What kind of health problems?" he asks, tipping his head. "I mean, he was looking pretty worn out when I stopped by last week, but I thought that was just him working on that house complex thing that you're all moving into. " His expression is a bit worried, and he chews on his lower lip for a moment. "Is it.../bad/?" "Oh my god you should see how his designs for that are coming along. He borrowed B's -- ri/dic/ulous magic projector thing he steals home from you guys's work sometimes and worked like a fiend for days straight without sleeping. I think he's building us like. Fucking. Hippie Disneyland or something." Dusk shakes his head, wing dragging lightly against Micah's hand as his pettings move away. He focuses in on his folding, a kind of lazy-loose job of it, really, dropping the sort of shoddily folded clothes into his hamper as each is finished. "No, really, I want to hear. Your /professional/ paranoid-opinion." Micah's sorting continues until the bag is empty and two machines mostly full. Soaps and coins are added to each before setting the machines to run their cycles. "I don't even know," he replies to Doug with a frown, trudging back over to lean against Dusk. "Ohgosh, he was like the worst addict with that hologram toy. Couldn't pull 'im away from it. Barely ate anythin' an' wouldn't sleep for days." His head shakes roughly at Dusk's request. "You're really gonna ask me t'trot out days an' weeks worth of worry when he's already got the results in? Are y'/tryin'/ t'make m'head explode? Just go read a whole lot of medical websites on every kinda brain mass that's ever happened an' negative side effects of implanted devices if y'want a general idea." There's a range of emotions that plays across Doug's face at the revelation of Hive's addiction to the holographic computer, and his left eye twitches visibly before he colors deeply, and wrestles his face back to his mostly worried expression. "That's good," he says with a small tug of his mouth to one side. "Those things are really handy for the stuff we work on. I can just imagine how good they'd be for architectural drafting." He falls silent, then, listening to Micah with bleak concern in his eyes. "Shit." "What?" Dusk's brows raise at Doug's expression. "S'that face about?" His wing folds inward, claw scraping through his hair as he exhales sharply. "Fuck, /yeah/, I really wanted you to. I was hoping you'd tell me something really horrifically terrible so that I could feel better about reality. My head's been exploding all night, okay?" He reaches down for his thermos again with a tiny plink-plink-plink of metal as he picks it up; when he sets it back on the table, its steel sides have small depressions indented into the sides spaced where his fingers were gripping. "You know you have like a /twitch/." His claw flicks towards Doug's eye. "Right about there." "Well, when I think about it I'm picturin' 'im goin' through it all an' I don't have the luxury of knowin' it ain't /true/ yet. Sor--apologies." Micah's head falls forward, forehead pressed into Dusk's shoulder. The metallic sounds earn a shifting of his eyes, but his head doesn't move. Doug ducks his head when Dusk notes his expression, and his mouth twists a bit. "'s stupid," he says, shaking his head firmly. "And not important." He looks up when the metal plinks, and his expression is back to worried for a moment. He doesn't seem to have the words to offer comfort, but he reaches out with his foot to nudge gently at the air near Dusk's hip. When the twitch is pointed out, he withdraws his foot, reflexively reaching up to rub at the indicated spot. "Too much caffeine," he says unconvincingly, shrugging a bit helplessly. "I've been burning the candle at both ends, lately." "Uh -- /huh/." Doug says it unconvincingly and Dusk /looks/ unconvinced, eying the teenager with an intensely skeptical look for a moment. Until his dryer buzzes, and he gives up on folding his clothes. He pats at Micah's head for a moment but then moves aside, and just sweeps the rest of his clothes unfolded into his hamper. He moves aside from the table to open up the dryer and haul out the rest of the laundry. He buries his face in the huge armload of it, wrapping his wings around it and luxuriating for a moment in the warmth. "Dryer sheets," he decides, once he dumps it into the hamper. "Definitely the better way to go." He slips his laptop onto the top of the laundry pile, hefting the fully-laden basket effortlessly in one hand and picking up his thermos again in the other to head with his things for the door. Micah's head turns slightly at the back-and-forth regarding twitches and their sources, but he doesn't manage to muster the energy to address it. When Dusk moves away, he finally holds his own weight. And cringes at the inane laundry talk before settling on the floor next to his bag, just waiting on the machines to stop running. More waiting. --- Barely a minute after Dusk has left the laundry room, Micah's phone buzzes with a text: *(Dusk --> Micah): Come up whenever you're not tethered to laundry. Probably a better discussion over cocoa than chores.