Logs:Company

Company
Dramatis Personae Flicker, Hive, Steve
In Absentia	2019-04-14 "Wait, are you your /own/ survivor?"
Location Tessier Residence, Greenwich Village
Understated opulence claims this spacious and well-kept townhome, the decor throughout the whole of it of the highest quality and carefully chosen. The front door opens onto the entrance hall, a closet close at hand to receive coats and shoes -- the pale hardwood floors gleam underfoot, unsullied by tracked-in mess from outside. The living room beyond the entrance is all dark woods and pale earth tones, comfortable couches and armchairs and a thick soft rug laid down beneath. Two large and painstakingly aquascaped aquariums flank the entrance to the dining room, with several brightly coloured species of fish within. Most of the rest of the wall space, notably, is taken up with shelves -- shelves crammed with books of every subject and genre. A study branching off of the main hall is cozy, small, done in pale blues and lined with books as well around the large computer desk and smaller futon, though these rarer books are cased behind glass. Another securely locked door leads to the basement, and another to the full bathroom downstairs. The kitchen connects to the living room; in contrast, it is sleek and modern and well-appointed, stocked by someone who takes their cooking seriously. And takes their alcohol equally seriously -- to one side of the kitchen there is a fully-stocked bar. The back door to the kitchen looks out on a small well-kept garden. It's been a gray, blustery day of April showers, but as evening nears the sky finally clears, leaving the city damp and fresh and just a bit cleaner, perhaps. Supper is still in the oven at the Tessier residence, filling the house with the savory smells of roasted brussels sprouts and potatoes au gratin. The sound system in the living room is playing 'When He Sees Me' from /Waitress/, and Steve is in the process of clearing away tea things and plates from the coffee table. He's still in his Sunday best, a fine lavender dress shirt and charcoal slacks, although he's gotten rid of the tie if he had one to begin with, and his sleeves are neatly rolled up to bare muscular forearms. There's not much warning when Steve suddenly develops COMPANY. No knock -- the door doesn't even open. There is a brief motion outside its glass pane and then, just as quick, Flicker is standing inside the back door. He's opening it with one hand (his mechanical arm grained like wood today and speckled with raindrops that look quite wet but on closer inspection are part of the design), reaching down to take off his polished dress shoes with the other. He, too, has neat slacks, a crisp grey-blue button down, his tie also long since vanished. "Oh, hey!" Bright smile, bright tone. A briefly self-conscious inward flush that for once /doesn't/ make it as far as his cheeks -- just a quick mental heads up to Hive. << Company. >> "Dinner /always/ smells so good around here." << Dude, /we're/ company. >> Unsurprisingly Hive is slower than Flicker to actually appear, having to drag himself across the yard and in the door the pedestrian way. He's downright shabby in contrast to the other two men, sneakers and well-worn jeans faded and fraying around their hems, a beaten up old corduroy jacket, and a black t-shirt featuring a design of two hands emerging from orange and blue ovals, each in the act of sketching the other hand's portal into being. He stops by the door, dragging his feet a few times on the mat before stepping inside. "We just ate but he's like. A bottomless pit." Steve has just begun to turn toward the movement in the window when Flicker appears, and he steps back quite reflexively into a fighting stance. The physical shift is actually fairly subtle compared to the abrupt cascade of reactions in his mind: a dizzyingly quick, wordless assay of entries and exits, potential weapons (the plates in his hands being first in line), and people he might need to protect (Lucien in his room, Matt to return soon). All this mental preparation dissipates as soon as he recognizes Flicker -- though, unfortunately, the adrenaline rush is already underway -- and he also breaks into a smile, though blushing fiercely through it. "Welcome!" << /Welcome?/ >> He cheeks burn even redder. "Not really my place to say that anymore, but it's --" He breaks off when Hive comes in, his mindscape suddenly shifting again, guarded and anxious now. "-- habit. Good evening to you both." He deposits the plates in the sink. << /Calm down/, you're jumping at shadows and the man can /hear you think/, just -- calm down. >> "Can I get either of you something to drink? A snack?" << We're /hardly/. >> Flicker doesn't scoff at this thought so much as swat it absently away. He nudges his own shoes into a neat line by the door. His own cheeks now do tint red when Steve drops into fight mode. His smile doesn't change, nor the casual ease in his own mind. "You're doing the dishes. That earns you /some/ greeting rights, doesn't it?" He's gone to peek into the oven. "I'm not a /bottomless/ pit. I'm just a pit that -- empties very fast. Some accuracy, please." "Lucien would not appreciate that, those are nice plates." Hive has actually sat down by the door to untie his shoes, the process slower than it seems like it really ought to take. "Fine, a pit with a fucking. /Hole/ in the bottom is that better." He shakes floppy hair back from his eyes and looks up at Steve, exhaling an amused chuff. "I do like that you went straight from not-my-place-to-say-hi to can-I-offer-you-the-Tessiers'-food. You really gotta /own/ your belonging. Just lean into it and this place will feel like home in no time." A beat. "So what drinks you got?" Steve winces at Hive's comment. "I doubt /Flicker/ would have appreciated it," he says. Then, to Flicker, "I /was/ doing the dishes, but I also almost threw them at you. Not because I have anything against you, or the plates, I was just startled. I can relate, though to...well. Needing to eat a lot, and often. Would you like some cookies?" Even as he's finally beginning to recover his usual coloration, he's flushing again. "I -- well, like I said, it's habit." << Doesn't hurt they make it feel like home. Even when I'm /not/ living with them. >> "Anyway, they'd want me to." He goes over to the refrigerator, but is beginning to list beverages before he reaches it, "Coffee and tea, more varieties than I can list, orange juice, milk, cashew milk, um..." Pulling open the refrigerator, he continues, "...lemonade, some fancy fizzy stuff that's called lemonade but definitely /isn't/, Coca-Cola, ginger ale. Water." "People have thrown worse at me. I did kind of barge in." Flicker straightens up away from the oven. Hops up onto a counter, sitting atop it and leaning back against a cabinet. His eyes drop from Steve when the other man blushes again. There's a small tug at his lips, a brief flutter of something in him that Hive can feel him push back down as habitually as scratching an itch. "-- What, they'd want you to belong here? Pretty much always, I'd guess. -- I could go for some fancy lemonade stuff." His hands curl against the counter's edge, briefly. Only Hive can feel the brief restraint of impulse to flash over to the fridge by Steve and take the lemonade himself. As if he hasn't already been startling enough. "Please, he'd barely even have noticed." Hive has finally managed to rid himself of shoes, but doesn't bother standing back up. He curls an arm around his knee, shaking his head. "It's /pressé/, and it defeats the whole purpose of having deconstructed hipster lemonade if it's /already reconstructed/. Flicker definitely wants your cookies," he adds, with an afterthought for himself: "What /sort/ of cookies? Maybe /I/ want cookies." He leans back against the door, his eyes closing. "Where is home now, anyway?" "Maybe that, too," Steve muses with a smile that looks mild compared to the affection behind it as he pulls a glass bottle from the refrigerator, "but I meant they'd want me to see to guests in their absence." He fills one glass with the clear, sparkling beverage and passes it to Flicker. "Lemon shortbread," he tell Hive, already loading round golden yellow cookies onto a fresh plate. << Why did he need to ask that? /Did/ he need to ask that, or was it just for my comfort? >> "Well, I'm still looking for a long-term rental, but for the moment?" His smile goes a little lopsided at a quick flash of memory from their first meeting. "Red Hook." << Plays well to the press, at least. >> He starts to put the pressé away, then pauses and raises both eyebrows and bottle at Hive. "Thanks." Flicker's not-actually-wooden fingers clink quietly against the bottle as he takes it. Sips it slowly. At the mention of shortbread, (despite a very large meal not long past!) hunger gets the better of him. Steve hasn't actually even finished retrieving the cookies when /abruptly/ the other man is no longer on the counter but there beside him, swiping a pair off the plate. After a brief reconsidering, swiping /two/ pairs; he delivers one of the cookies to Hive but returns to his place on the counter a heartbeat later still holding three. "That is not a search I envy you. I /gotta/ imagine the rental market looked a little..." Somewhere in the back of his mind, Flicker is picturing Steve trundling out to the wilds of unpopulated Brooklyn in a covered wagon. Shooting buffalo out of its side. Setting up a homestead on the waterfront. Dying of dysentery. "Different in your day. But on the other hand," his eyes sweep, lingering, over Steve, "you look like you have a good amount of blood you can sell so that's a leg up on most New Yorkers." Hive tips his forehead down against his knee, his smirk half-hidden against his jeans. The image he reflects back to Flicker corrects Flicker's mental impression: instead, Steve battling mammoths in order to take shelter in a cave. "You pick Red Hook, or Luci? Can't imagine it's like you remember." He pushes his shoes off against Flicker's. Slowly pushes himself to his feet. He moves over to stand by the counter, leaning up against it, half tucked beside Flicker's leg. His jaw works slowly, teeth grinding quietly for a brief moment as his eyes shift to fix a moment on Steve. "Little of both," he answers, aloud. "I don't just know everything you know. It's not like that." Steve manages to conceal his flinch this time, Flicker's rapid movement setting off his adrenaline-primed combat reflexes, if only inwardly. A split second later, the realization that Hive probably noticed it anyway sends a ripple of shame through him. "The search -- yeah, even with my pension and..." He frowns, fighting down a deep sense of /wrongness/ inside. ".../survivor's benefits/, housing is scarce and expensive. I'm probably not going to be selling my blood, though." The last comment sounds guarded despite a considered effort to keep his town casual. << God knows how many government agencies want that, and what they'd do /with/ it. >> He fills the plate back up and puts it on the counter near the other men, but not before grabbing a piece for himself, too. "It was...kind of both and neither?" He give a small, half shake of his head, takes a bite of his cookie. "We were on a tight schedule and there weren't very many options that suited our needs. One of the handful happened to be in Red Hook. Luci thought it would...suit my narrative, and I also found the idea of being back on familiar ground apealing. But you're right -- it's changed a lot." Those words bring with them a wash of ineffable sadness. << Why would I have expected otherwise? But it's just so /surreal/. >> He studies Hive, long and considering. "What /is/ it like? If that isn't too personal." A faint flush of wordlessly ironic amusement at this. "Wait, are you your /own/ survivor?" Flicker rubs a hand against the back of his neck, face scrunching up as he tries to work through this. "That's -- I guess not a situation the Army has to deal with a lot. I guess they're having to figure this out on the fly, too." He pushes aside the more comical exaggerations of What Steve's Past Was Like. "Having to sell organs for rent aside, what are the biggest changes? In your neighborhood." He takes a bite of his cookies, leaning an arm against Hive's shoulder. Hive's teeth grind again, harder. He leans back against Flicker -- more mentally than otherwise, a heavy psionic weight that pushes up against the younger man's mind. He turns his cookie over in his hand, small crumbs shedding into his palm. From him, there's a long silence, save for the quiet creaking of his teeth, his eyes fixed off somewhere past Steve's shoulder. "You know a lot, about yourself. All your experiences, all your memories, they're all in there /somewhere/. But you aren't thinking, every moment, about every single fact you know, every single thing that's every happened to you. I hear the things that are at the front, the things you're thinking /now/. It's still a lot. It's not like --" His teeth creak again, eyes lowering for a moment, "Like /most/ people consciously control every thought that goes through their heads. It's loud and it's messy and it gives away way more than people would care to. And it's a weird thing to navigate. Because it's not like by standing here next to you, suddenly I just /know/ what your mother's maiden name was," he explains with a small shrug of a shoulder. A brief pause. "-- but once I say it, it's really likely, you're thinking it, and now I know." "Seems that I am." Steve runs a hand through his hair, looking down though smiling all the while. "Since I was declared dead without next of kin, the Army never had to pay out for anything except my...funeral. And now they..." He gives a small shrug. "Want to get on my good side, I suppose? I'll take it." Finishing the cookie, he goes to transfer the plates from the sink to the dish washer. "It's not as crowded or filthy as I remember, but it feels /run down/ in a different way, now. So many condemned buildings and empty lots fenced in with developers' signs, and half the buildings people /are/ living in look like they /should/ be condemned. A lot of folks around are newcomers just living wherever they can afford, and those I've talked to who are actually from there -- well, they're expecting to get pushed out by the rich people and waterfront condos." He closes the dishwasher with excessive care and leans back against the counter across from the others. There's a sense of roiling unsettled displacement that feels as much like a physical pressure in his chest as an actual /emotion./ It doesn't recede as he ruminates on Hive's answer, just sort of flows into the other discomfort . << Sarah Marie Donnelly -- oh. Like that. >> "So in effect, it's mostly just extremely difficult to lie to you. Or...no, I guess it's broader than that." The vague anxiety that arrived with Hive doesn't cease, but it does grow more manageable as Steve draws mental boundaries around it. "So you can't really...say, search around in someone's head?" << Though really, why would he want to /tell/ me that, considering how I reacted that other time? >> A flurry of thoughts, half formed and rapid, whirl through Flicker's mind. The devastation of gentrification throughout all of the city. What tons of empty lots mean for Hive. What it means for the neighborhood. The potential for skating around that natural reflex for your brain to helpfully supply whatever information Hive is nosing for. Whether they ought to share pointers on the easiest ways to deal with telepathic oversharing. Not his mother's maiden name, though. At Steve's question, quietly, he only presses mentally back against Hive. Works his way through another cookie. Hive's teeth don't stop grinding, his shoulder tense under Flicker's arm. He drags his gaze slowly to Steve's face. "Sure, I can." Steve doesn't answer immediately. He does meet Hive's gaze, and nods -- once, emphatically. Beneath this terse outward reaction is a spike of fear and attendant adrenaline rush -- just when the previous one had about run its course -- but since he's not actually /surprised/ this time, he takes it somewhat more in stride. His mental processing still goes disorientingly visual and haptic, much as it had when reacting to a potential physical threat, but this time it's incongruously flashing through (mostly) memories of fights -- sometimes too quick and chaotic to follow, but all quite violent and perilous. At last, he says, "Alright." He frowns. Opens his mouth as if to speak again, but nothing comes out. His thoughts are still a conflicted jumble of fear and curiosity and snippets of memory, defying his attempts to distill them into words. What finally does tumble out, only an instant after it occurs to him, is "Thank you." In Flicker's mind, there's tension. A careful wariness; he makes a studied attempt /not/ to stare too much at Steve as they wait for reply. Instead working his way slowly through his last cookie. But the protectiveness in his mind is still preemptively /ready/ to bristle, twitchily running over any number of defensive replies -- that (slightly sheepishly) subside in his mind once Steve speaks up. He just exhales, slowly. Hive slouches back against the counter, and only now finally eats his shortbread, licking the mess of crumbs up off his palm. "I don't know if anyone's told you this specifically yet, and it's /probably/ pretty obvious, but just -- in case. If you find out someone's a mutant, that's generally not information you should share without their explicit say-so. A lot of people don't /tend/ to react --" He flicks fingers in Steve's direction. "With much restraint." Slowly, his teeth grind again. "... especially not to people like me." Steve shakes his head. "No. But I did sort of put it together." << As with homosexuality, though I suppose /that's/ changed. >> His mind's eye flashes to Ryan at the podium, accepting his fourth Grammy award. And then, without any obvious connection at all, to a young Howard Stark at some kind of social function with a stunningly beautiful woman on his arm. Steve pulls sharply away from this memory and the visceral pain that comes with it. "I take it I should also not /ask/...the sorts of things I just asked you? For the same reason." "That's complicated. Some people don't mind. I wouldn't ask a stranger, but a friend --" Flicker shrugs. "You have to learn from someone. I'd just make sure they're /okay/ with the questions, first." Hive's jaw tightens; he studies Steve's face a long and searching moment. "Yeah, like with being gay. And /that/ hasn't changed as much as we'd /like/." Hive's lips twitch slightly, at this, and he tucks himself further up against Flicker's side. "With me and --" He waves a hand toward his head, "I tell most people pretty much up front, but a lot of people don't want to do that. World we live in, it sure as fuck isn't /safe/ to, either. In my case, I just..." Slowly, his shoulders are tensing again. "There's boundaries I'm /going/ to be crossing with people. I can't stop that. Least I can do is let them know, if they're going to be around me long. The fallout, I've learned to manage." He inspects his palm carefully for crumbs before lowering his hand to rest an elbow against the counter. "That...seems sensible," Steve hazards. << As much as /anything/ about this does. >> "I appreciate the pointers. I tried looking online, but..." He bites his lower lip. "Well. That's not always a reliable source of information." When Hive addresses his unspoken comment aloud, he manages to keep his cringing /mostly/ on the inside. "Ah. I just thought...people seemed somewhat open about it, from what I could tell." << As much as /we'd/ like? >> his mind echoes, his gaze snapping rapidly between Hive and Flicker for a moment, but he pushes this not-quite-formed thought firmly aside in favor of...continuing his chaotic attempt at processing what and how to feel about telepathy. "That's very conscientious of you, and I don't envy you that responsibility or risk. /Or/ the fallout." Then he adds, hastily, "I won't say a word to anyone else on the matter." Flicker lowers his eyes to study the intricate detailing on his wood-patterned fingers. "I don't know exactly what it was like in your time, but things can still be very difficult for people in that community now. People are more open about it, but it's complicated. Not everyone /accepts/ it. People still get harassed, or worse. There are a lot of reasons people might choose not to --" The shrug of his shoulder is small. He looks back up at Steve at the last addition. "Thanks. Hive downplays it, but some people have been really terrible. It /is/ a lot to process. And if you want someone to talk through this with who -- isn't a telepath but. Has had a lot of time to think through how this affects people, I'm happy to talk sometime." Hive's brows lift briefly, his eyes drifting up toward Flicker and then back over to Steve. His, "Thanks," is gruff. For a moment he is quiet. Teeth starting to grind again. But that stops, relaxes. He pushes himself up straighter, shaking his hair back from his eyes. "Matt's home."