Logs:Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.
| Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. | |
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cn: violence | |
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia | 2023-02-17 Please just tell me what you need from me, and I can tell you whether that's something I can give. (immediately followed by a conversation.) |
| Location | |
It's been a chilly, drizzly day in New York, the rain flickering on and off like a leaky faucet. In Freaktown, the communal dinners have mostly been relocated inside, though as the evening dries out, more and more trickle back out to gather around the covered firepits. Erik is coming from the east facing wing of the God House, a contemporary style mansion with converted into an interfaith chapel and community center. On the sill of the room Freaktown's minyan meets, a squat yellow candle in a glass jar is just beginning its long burn. There are imprints, light and fading on Erik's skin, from where leather straps and wooden boxes were bound too tight to his forehead and forearm some hours ago. Two small cloth bags rest in the crook of his arm alongside a small, aged book with Yiddish across the cover. He’s dressed very simply — a chore jacket in plain grey, a folded plastic bag peaking out one pocket, dark jeans, dark shirt, work boots, reading glasses tucked into a breast pocket. Perhaps “Max” is known in the community now for his penchant for hair dye, or perhaps Erik has been reminded of how recognizable the shock of white is — today it’s freshly red again, though more of a reddish-brown than it had been on his local debut, a black velvet yarmulke pinned to the crown of his head. He’s making his way, now, to a covered patio, where an evening bonfire has been acquiring hangers-on, their attention rapt on the current storyteller. Erik’s, too, is on her, face carefully fixed in an expression of neutral interest. He waits for this story to end, for the torch to be passed along the fire, before approaching. “Might I have a word?” Erik's cool baritone is quiet under the chatter, pleasant, but not actually a question. The current storyteller is apparently too absorbed in her tale to notice Erik's approach. "...instead of withering where it fell, it took root in the rocky soil and thrived." Anahita is wrapped in a threadbare gray coat slightly too large for her, faded blue denim overalls, and black engineer's boots, a mug cradled between her hands. "Eventually, Starbuck brought back other plants on the brink of extinction, painting our once-barren hillsides with the rarest wildflowers from every corner of the earth. And..." She leans forward, as if conveying something confidential, though she doesn't lower her voice, "...it wasn't just flowers, either!" Her eyes do flick to Erik now, firelight dancing in their dark depths. "But that's another story." Shaking out the blue shawl she had folded in her lap to drape over her shoulders, she rises, gently fending off questions from youngsters until she's extricated herself from the circle. She goes to "Max", dipping her head in a bow, though after this she meets his eyes, steady and fearless. "How can I help you, Sir?" The returning dip of Erik’s head is definitely not a bow, but some sort of (respectful? Maybe?) acknowledgement. “Walk with me.” Once again, not a request, however mild his voice might be. He gestures away from the fire — from everyone, really, to a set of vaguely damp chairs around a patio table some ways away from the bonfire, out of earshot of this group. “I had some thought I might offer you an apology, for our last meeting.” Is this the apology? “And then I started hearing the most curious stories from the children.” His eyebrow arches, gaze falling on Anahita. “Ahab and Starbuck?” Faint curiosity here, maybe even amusement. Anahita follows Erik without comment, her gait slowly and even until it hitches at Erik's question. "I've always used pseudonyms and epithets. A lot of people went back in the closet after the fall. I was in the closet, until Prometheus." The water on the chairs rises up into beads which sluice off in all directions, leaving them dry, but she does not sit. "I make certain they are unrecognizable, though those who already know about Utopia may still guess. The children do love Ahab and Starbuck, though." Erik only blinks at the display of Anahita's power, the just-too-firm curl of his hand around the back of the chair the only external clue to what he thinks of that, of what he thinks when he hears the word Prometheus. "Certainly. It is only ever safe to name our dead, and even then..." His gaze dips to his lap, where the tallis, the tefillin, the siddur all rest in a stack on one thigh. Moves this pile to the table with no further comment. "I wonder -- in your telling, do captain and first mate perish like their namesakes?" He's pulling out a silvered cigarette case from his coat, plucking out one before offering Anahita her choice of them. "Or do they make their way to shore?" Anahita only sits at a slightly delay. Takes a cigarette at a slight delay, too. "They perished, but not like their namesakes." She fishes from her pocket an ancient steel lighter with a battered red star on its side and offers Erik its flame before lighting her own cigarette. She takes a draw and breathes a stream of smoke up toward the sky. When she speaks again her voice is different, surer and stronger. "Ahab and Starbuck and a few other courageous warriors remained to defend the evacuation of Utopia. They held off the entire armada, a thousand ships strong, until the rest of us were safely away. When at last Ahab fell to his knees, Starbuck dying in his arms, he gave a mighty cry of rage and defiance. The ocean heard him, and howled with him. Waves crashed and surged as though driven by a tempest, though the sky was clear and the wind was still. The cowards sent to destroy us quaked within the steel hulls of their ships as the sea opened up her very depths to swallow them whole." There's a fine tremor in Anahita's hand when she raises the cigarette again, and it's another breath before she adds, "Usually there's a bit more in the way of glorious battle. I'm working on a curse, but certainly there's nothing along the lines of 'oh Ahab, Ahab, lo thy work' or 'from Hell's heart, I stab at thee', if you're concerned about that." Erik lights his cigarette on Anahita's flame. His first drag is slow, deep, the smoke curling out of his mouth on the exhale and blowing behind him in the faint breeze. The second pull is quicker, in time with when his fictional counterpart falls to his knees, the breath out sharp after. His hand trembles, ash dislodging from the end and falling onto the edge of his prayerbook. "Your talents are just as the children say -- uncannily evocative, as though... did you -- " Erik doesn't finish this question, changing instead to ask: "I wonder whom you might yet cast as Stubb." His voice is tighter, more strained than when he had asked. “Your mother? Surely you will not leave her part as only Ahab's grief made manifest." "Oh, most everyone else gets somewhat less literary names," Anahita says lightly. "And for that story, anyway..." She lapses for a moment into silence, her hand stilling though smoke continues to rise from the cigarette pinched between her fingers. "I call my mother by her own name, and she's terribly heroic in her own right, but..." She's suddenly animated again, puffing lightly at her smoke and then shaking her head. "I still can't tell of how she dies, not specifically. Not how I saw it. Not yet. But I will, someday. There's nothing else anywhere that proves she ever lived. Just the memories of those who loved her." Her gaze drops away from Erik to the faint red glow of the brand on her cigarette. "Of her family. I know your idea of what that means is different, and that's fair enough, but she saw you as a brother. So. Even if you never want to tell your side of those stories, and that's also fair, I'm glad you remember her well." “You shouldn’t have seen. You should have been far on the waves before —“ Erik pulls on the cigarette, his grip tightening too far — it folds, bending in half where his fingers pinch. These chairs are not of wrought iron but they hum anyway, the screws and bolts shivering with a pulse of Erik’s power. “She was…” Erik’s gaze drops to the siddur, the heavy crease on the spine that lines up with the placement of the Mourner’s Kaddish. “…she was not my blood.” His voice is carefully neutral but the hum of metal around them is not. “That does not mean I did not care for her. That I do not wish she was still with us now. Do you,” and now the rattling takes on a further edge, the metal on each of their bodies pressing just oh so much closer to skin, “find this healing? This laying of my failures to your family at my feet?” "I shouldn't have," Anahita agrees, puffing placidly. "But I snuck off of Cloudraker before she launched. I wanted to help, and didn't know any better. Marie put me on one of the last boats to leave. But, I saw." If she's intimidated by the rattling this time, it does not much show beyond a slight tightening of her jaw. "I never said you didn't care for her, and you certainly didn't fail her. It was her decision to stay and fight, and I honor that, and I'm sure she'd be glad you survived to look after --" Here she does stiffen. "She'd have been glad you survived. And I am truly sorry if I've hurt you, again." Her shoulders do not relax, but there's a sort of weariness in her carriage now. "I hadn't meant to talk about Utopia with you anymore, until you asked. I don't want to tiptoe around you, Sir. We're both too old for that and there is too much that still needs doing." She turns both hands up before her, a gesture of openness or supplication or resignation. Perhaps all three. "Please just tell me what you need from me, and I can tell you whether that's something I can give." "What could you have done other than die on that beach? What could you have done other than kill more of us? If Marie had one more jump left, do you know who we could have--" His fist curls harder, the red end of the cigarette going out. Erik stares at Anahita across the table, eyes narrowing bit by bit. "You are half my age," comes out instead of a reason or request. There is silence, tense with anticipation of something, anything. Erik breaths out slow, murmuring; "...all of this has happened before." The links of steel at his wrist dart out, fast glints in the dimming light, and wrap around Anahita's wrists. "Marie drowned in Amsterdam, twenty years ago. But she was such a strong swimmer. I will not be made a fool of again, Lien." The links tighten, hard, pressing into flesh and against bone. "Every possible way to weaken me you bring -- my most haunting failures made flesh -- Utopia, Prometheus, Yuehai, Charles -- who do you work for?" His voice is rising now, anger loud enough to be heard for some small distance, not in the Voice of Magneto but still terrifying in his own unadulterated accent. "HAMMER? SHIELD? MAD?" Anahita's eyebrows raise up, but if she was going to answer any of Erik's rhetorical questions she doesn't get a chance. She flinches hard when the steel presses in around her wrist, and it's another moment before she manages to address his at least ostensibly unrhetorical questions. "I'm sorry for what happened to Marie, but I had nothing to do with that and I don't work for anyone!" She tries to rise, tries to pull away, only barely biting back the cry of pain when her magnetic manacles do not budge. Her calm is deserting her now, her voice tight with panic, "Please don't do this, Erik, I'm not your enemy!" Has Ion been watching this exchange? Probably not, he's hard to miss and certainly wasn't present tonight at Anahita's storytime. But someone has been watching it -- quite a few someones, shifting from curious attempting-to-be-surreptitious scooching closer to eavesdrop to tense but open rubbernecking as things get more heated. And, clearly, somewhere in those someones a Mongrels signal flare has been lit -- because just a second ago there was no Ion and now here there is one. He arrives with a small pop and a faint wobble from one of the ubiquitously cheerfully-unseasonable string lights liberally festooning most of Freaktown's homes and lampposts and fences. For a lightning-quick there-and-gone moment when he appears he is to Anahita's left, touching a light hand to her shoulder -- the shift in his position then to interpose himself between Erik and Anahita is almost too fast to track with the naked eye, but certainly Anahita can feel the brief electric-shock zap that contracts her muscles, certainly she and Erik both can feel when the steel manacles are suddenly no longer on her wrists but resting instead in their constricted-circle configuration now in Ion's calloused hand. The grimly serious expression on his face currently is a little at odds with his domestic-cosy look right now. He's in a black apron reading "CUSTOM TEXT HERE" in bold white still worn over his jeans and soft grey-and-white flannel, no cut to be seen but a metal spatula in his hand and a wilting crocus tucked behind his ear, a pair of extremely fuzzy socks on his feet with little flop-eared puppies decorating the toes. "Ey, Friend," his gravelly bass is not booming with his usual exuberance, just steady and low, "we having a problem here?" Somewhere in Anahita's pleading Erik has stood up, leaning forward across the table with unhinged certainty gleaming in his eyes. "Helen? She would not be the first human ally to sell us out." Her answer is not satisfying -- the metal rectangles press harder, the edges on the back of her wrists near deep enough to draw blood. "Prometheus? Do they want my child back? Over my dead body will you take her from me--" The links move faster than Magneto's reflexes. He looks up, meets Ion's gaze with his own full of fury. Clenches his jaw. The steel clatters into a pile in Ion's hand, inert with Magneto's power withdrawn. Quiet, but not whispered, this the tone of manifestos and meetings, this the voice of Magneto speaking; "I suspect you've a spy in your midst, Mr. Ion." Shocked and freed in the same instant, Anahita yelps and pulls her arms in to wrap around herself, deep angry marks showing from beneath her cuffs. There are tears trickling down her cheeks and her eyes are wild. When she speaks again her voice is breathy and trembling. "I may be a fool, but I am no traitor." "Anahita come straight out the cages, ain't nobody signing themselves up for a decade of fucking torture labs just to sneak into a home ain't even exist yet when she gone in." Ion's fingers curl loosely upwards, not really gripping the metal links so much as forming a loose bowl for them to rest in. "And this is. A safe home for all us that need one and we work damn hard to keep it that way, yeah?" He holds his hand out, offering the pile of metal links back out to Magneto, his hand and gaze steady -- though he rather conspicuously does not move any farther from Anahita. "Means I grateful when people keeping a good eye out, bring me word if they think someone here's a danger -- and means don't nobody bring no violence to my doorstep, ain't no matter their suspicions. We gonna keep having a problem, sir?" Magneto's glare across to Anahita is wild and angry, jaw clenched hard. His attention swivels to Ion, expression unchanged, then out the corner of his eye to the rubberneckers. Eyes flick up, to the illumination of the Christmas lights. Down to Ion's hand and the steel links piled there. Slow, they float up, brushing against Ion's fingertips, until they've caught enough of a shadow and then fling out towards Anahita -- -- but whether they make their target, only Anihita will be witness to. Ion does not look very surprised that the answer is a resounding Yes to More Problems but he is lacking some of his usual glee at the prospect of an imminent fight. In almost the same breath that the links have left his hand his other is flinging outward, spatula brandished towards Erik like it's a remarkably ineffective gun. Or a remarkably effective one -- though there's no trigger to pull, as his arm flings out a brightshiver crackle of electricity licks down the blade, arcs out towards Magneto. The moment the small jolt hits the other man, the Master of Magnetism simply -- vanishes. The spatula clatters, discarded, to the ground. | |
