ArchivedLogs:Very Well

Very Well
Dramatis Personae Dusk, Isra
In Absentia	2015-11-01 "Sometimes forget what feeling shitty's like."
Location <NYC> The Roost - Harbor Commons - Lower East Side
The second level of this house takes up less floor space than the ground floor, owing largely to the open sweep of balcony that overlooks half the home below. Up here the floors are in natural hardwood, polished and smooth. At one side of the balcony, again, a door leads over to the adjacent unit in the house. One door off the balcony leads to a quiet office space, with a wide metal-and-glass desk, long sofa and armchair opposite a large pair of bookshelves. A tall glass door in the large windows on the back wall leads out to a wide outdoor balcony overlooking the river. The second door leads to Dusk's bedroom, dominated by greens and greys. He has finally actually gotten himself a /proper/ bed to pair with his dresser and bookshelf, king-sized and settled low to the ground onto a solid wood base with a number of drawers built into it. His desk holds the desktop -- somewhat literally. The desk /itself/, with see-through glass body and softly glowing lights inside, has been configured to /be/ the computer case. Closer inspection of a pair of small decorative aquariums sitting to either side of its three monitors finds them to /also/ be computer cases, their inner workings submerged in a pale blue liquid on a bed of aquarium pebbles alongside plastic plants and little plastic castles or fake coral. In this bedroom, too, a door leads out to the same balcony outside. Capping off the balcony at its other end is a guest bedroom, large wood-frame bed with a small end table, dresser, a hammock-chair hanging from the ceiling in a corner, a desk by the window. It's dark out, though it hasn't been for long, still early into the evening. Dusk's bedroom is dark, too, though there's light coming from his computer screen and from the glowing lights that ring his headphones, flashing in time with the sound that plays in them. /American Horror Story/ is playing on the screen, though Dusk is only half paying attention, where he lies curled up in bed in a tangle of blankets, semi-drifting off and snapping back awake every so often when his phone buzzes or when something interesting happens on the show. Isra slips into the room quietly, though the click-click-click of her talons on the steps certainly gave her away well before she even arrived at the door. She carries a large bowl of soup--tom yum, judgine by the scent--in one hand and a mug of something faintly herbal-smelling in the other. One wing stretches out to caress Dusk's back as she sinks to sit beside him in bed, setting aside her payload of hot fluids. 'Feeling any better?' she signs with her left hand, stroking the side of her lover's cheek with the knuckles of the other, checking his temperature--though, given her own consistenly low surface temperature, he always feels warm in any case. "Pause." Dusk's eyes flick to Isra once the show has frozen, his pathetic sniffle prooobably exaggerated for her benefit. 'This show is terrible,' he tells her, followed soon by, 'this cough is terrible. My back aches.' Granted, his back usually aches. The burning fever he still has, though, that's less usual. He presses his cheek up into her touch, nuzzling in against her. 'Maybe watch something less awful?' Isra manages to make the perfectly common grammatical necessity of lifting her eyebrow ridges look exaggerated. Her hand lingers against his cheek for a moment, and a frown creases her smooth, hairless brows. 'Soup and tea might help with the cough, and I will give you a back rub.' So saying, she slips her hand beneath the blanket to run her knuckles, cool and hard, down along his spine. 'I worry about you.' This neutrally, with no particular expression on her face, though the tip of her tail thumps the side of the bed gently and rhythmically. Dusk exhales slow and deep and shivery, the edge of a moan trapped in the sound as he relaxes under the touch. Between his wings, the muscles of his back are as tightly knotted as ever. His head turns, watching the thump of Isra's tail against the bed. "... soup sounds good." His voice is a little scratchy-rough. "It's probably passing. I just..." 'It's weird.' "Sometimes forget what feeling shitty's like." Isra lifts the bowl--generously sized for its contents--and hands it over before returning to knead Dusk's back. Both hands occupied now, she speaks aloud, "It is not that I think you so very catastrophically ill, but rather that you are ill at all, given how much you have fed and how much time elapsed." She bends to nip gently at the eloganted index metacarpal of Dusk's wing. "I think you should go see a doctor." Dusk groans, turning his face in against his pillow. His head shakes, hands coming up to scrunch underneath the pillow, pulling it in against his head. "Cuz there's so many of them that'd see me," he answers, muffled. "I can well understand you do not wish to seek treatment, and you have more concrete cause than most." Isra's hands continue their work, strong and steady, warming to his skin now. "But the clinic will see you, certainly." This just puts a small choking noise in Dusk's throat. "Hhhk. Fuck. Yeah. Right." Though he lifts his head a moment later, eyes wider. "Oh, shit." "Of course they will." Isra does pause for a moment now, nonplussed. "What is wrong?" Her body goes quite still, right down to her eyes, faintly luminescent with dimly reflected light from the--also still--screen. "I've. Been sick I didn't. My brain's been so fucking. Fff." Dusk scrubs his knuckles against his eyes, shoulders tightening inwards. He slumps back down against his pillow. "God. Fuck. They. The clinic. /Rasheed/. This whole time, they -- fuck." Slowly, he turns over, claws snagging on his blankets as his wings shift under him. "Rasheed's been -- Prometheus." "Doctor Toure was working with Prometheus?" Isra's question comes out very soft. Her lower voice drops in only at the word "with", lending it and the name of the infamous project a particularly ominous tone. She still has not moved, save for breathing and speaking. "What of Doctor Saavedro?" "Yes. No! Fuck." Dusk shakes his head, a growl rumbling in his throat. "Rasheed /founded/ Prometheus." His wings ripple against his back. "Iolaus knew. I don't think he was working with them. But he fucking /knew/. Since -- since all those fucking future dreams, he /knew/, all this time, and he just. Was doing. Fucking. Nothing." Isra falls silent, but her stillness fades by degrees into a fine, intensive quivering. She sets her jaw and nods--once, tightly. Her wings shiver out to a quarter of their full span, then fold back in, talons flexing as if searching of their own volition for something to dig into. "Founded it," she breathes at last. "We thought him an ally, a /saint/, and we--" Her words cut off with a snarl, the wicked sharp claws one one of her hands balling around and ripping into a blanket. "--trusted him with the lives of so many brothers and sisters while he--" "Founded it." Dusk's words are underlaid, still, with a growl. "This whole fucking time he's been acting like our friend. Acting like --" His teeth click together. "But actually." He drops his head back into the pillow. "So." His breathing is a little slower, audible in the quiet room. "/I'll/ be fine. Think I'll pass. On the goddamn. /Clinic/." Still again now like a statue, Isra waits for what seems like a long time before speaking. When she does, it's just a soft, barely audible, "Very well."