ArchivedLogs:Parents and Kids

Parents and Kids
Dramatis Personae Jackson, Anole	Ash Wednesday '
Location <NYC> Lower East Side
Historically characterized by crime and immigrant families crammed into cramped tenement buildings, the Lower East Side is often identified with its working-class roots. Today, it plays host to many of New York's mutant poor, although even here they are still often forced into hiding. It is late Wednesday evening by the time Jackson is leaving work. Late and chilly, and he's bundled up against it, a puffy silver jacket over his clothes and bright blue-and-pink scarf to go with his bright blue-and-pink hair. He has a messenger bag slung over his shoulder and is tugging a purple hat down over his head as he leaves the tattoo shop. The colours are bright over his very pale face, a black smudge contrastingly dark in the center of his forehead. Late means skulking-o-clock! Victor is here -- maybe not /skulking/ so much as hurrying out of a nearby grocery store, clothes bulging, bag bulging, his head ducked down against the cold or maybe just against people noticing his very green face. Someone notices /anyway/, as he hurries away, a man shoulder-checking the green teenager for not much reason save hey, green, given his mutter of "freak" as he passes by; Victor scrambles to get out of the way, a few cans of premade foods -- soup, beef stew, spaghetti-os -- toppling out of his layers of clothing to clunk against the sidewalk. He drops instantly to scramble for them. "Woah, hey," Jackson doesn't hear the freak but he does hear the cans clattering to the ground, and stops, a little wobbly as he stoops to help, grabbing the can of beef stew before it rolls off into the gutter. "Did that guy -- y'aright, kid?" He's looking up at Victor -- and doing a double-take, single eye widening, though he doesn't initially react past that. Just holds the can out. "Nonono it's fine I'm fine --" Victor /snatches/ at the can, nervously looking over a shoulder, though he relaxes when there is nobody there. "Sorry," he mumbles, ducking his head further when he notices the double-take. "I wasn't watching where I was -- sorry." But now he frowns, looking over Jackson's pallor, his wobbling, "-- I'm fine. Are /you/ okay?" "Yeah, no, I'm good." Jackson pushes himself to his feet, offering a hand out afterwards to help pull Victor to the same. "Hey, um, this is kind of a weird -- is your name Victor?" He sounds almost apologetic about the question. Victor takes Jackson's hand, once he's tucked the cans back away. He pulls himself upright in a quick scramble, but then his eyes widen and he /yanks/ his hand back, startled. He looks Jackson over warily, and looks around the quiet nighttime street. Also warily. "Y- do I know you?" He sounds like he doesn't. "No," Jackson says, and now he definitely sounds apologetic. He pulls a card out from his bag, beaten and weathered, for a private detective named Murphy Law. He shows it to Victor. "There was this guy over at Evolve. Asking about a lost kid. He said your parents were looking. And I didn't know if -- well it's just --" He's hasty, now, pulling out his cellphone to bring up a picture of identical twin boys, blue-skinned, gills at their necks, pure black eyes and /very/ sharp teeth in the bright grin of one. "-- S'just these are /my/ kids and I know how the world gets with them sometimes. And if they'd gone missing I'd be a wreck." Victor is starting to back away, nervous, at the sight of the card, but this stops at the photograph. He hesitates, looking over Jackson's screen a long while. He looks over Jackson's face, next, his hairless brow creasing. "Those are your kids? You don't look -- um." His weight shifts awkwardly, one foot to the other. "You don't look that old." "I know," Jackson answers, his cheeks flushing a little bit. "But yeah, they're my kids. I don't know who this detective guy is and I don't know what went down with your folks. But he says he ain't tryin' to make you go nowhere. That they just want to make sure you're alive." Victor's shoulders sag, his head ducking down low. "They're good parents," he says, swift and a little defensive. "Nothing went down -- it wasn't /their/ fault. They were /good/." He seems quite emphatic on this point, and when he glances up he looks at Jackson's phone before looking at his face. "S'it hard for you? Having them, does it make things hard?" Jackson exhales slowly, a slow smile twitching across his face. "S'a lot of hard things," he says with a shrug. "Having kids is hard. Having teenagers is hard." This is a liiittle wry. "But t'ain't them that -- they're worth it more'n anything else in my life. The world can throw whatever nonsense it wants at me. They're my family, you know? I love them. I want them in my life no matter how hard it gets sometimes." Victor's fingers wring at the straps of his backpack. It's a nervous fidget of motion, his eyes skipping away from Jackson, now. They jump across the street, dart up towards the cloudy night sky. "I got the guy's card already," he admits. "I wasn't gonna call." "/Wasn't/ gonna?" Jackson prompts. Victor shrugs uncomfortably. "Would you really want to hear from -- them." His hand waves towards the phone where the picture had been. "Like what if things were really bad? Like what if someone lit your house on fire? Because of them?" Jackson's mouth opens, and then closes again with a hard click of teeth. He's more careful when he speaks again. "-- If things'd been that bad I think I'd care about hearing from them even /more/. I'd want to know they was safe. I'd be terrified for them." "Oh." Just oh. Victor looks over Jackson carefully, and then nods. "I guess they're lucky to have you." He offers the man a small, tentative smile. "I should get. Um." He shrugs, carefully edging his way around Jackson. "Okay." Jackson returns the smile a good deal more brightly. "You, um. You take care." He watches as the boy starts to leave, his expression thoughtful, and then turns himself to continue making his way slowly down the street. From around a corner a figure quietly dressed in a green apron and a blue polo shirt watches, half hidden by the corner of a building. As the conversation progresses her impassive expression gradually falls into a frown -- and when it ends she vanishes, abandoning her pursuit of pilfered produce and returning to her work.