Logs:Mess

Mess
Dramatis Personae Jax, Lucien
In Absentia Tian-shin	2024-11-03 "Next year, you can damn well make it up to me."
Location <???> [location redacted]
This room is bleak. Not particularly any moreso or less-so than so many others of its kind, in so many other jails so many other places around the country. The ugly brick walls have been painted over with ugly taupe paint, thick and uneven in layers over layers. The long stretch of plastic tabletop is much-scratched, splotchy and pale with the bleaching of years of graffiti written and years of graffiti unevenly scoured away. The thick panel of shatterproof window, too, is scratchy, fingerprinted heavily already with the echoes of recent visits. There are clunky payphone-receivers hanging on the partitions between the divided and numbered stations, which would afford quite little privacy if anyone else were here visiting. Nobody is. Beneath the stark warnings painted bold on the walls above the windows -- ALL VISITORS SUBJECT TO SEARCH AT ANY TIME and NO PROFANITY and KEEP HANDS IN PLAIN VIEW AT ALL TIMES -- there's only one man visible on the freer side of the glass. Lucien's hands are in plain view, folded prim together just beneath his chin, elbows propped on the counter. If he's been waiting long, he doesn't look impatient about it. He doesn't look anything about it, bland and neat in a very unassuming grey suit and very unassuming grey expression. He's waiting a good bit longer before the door opens. The guards who enter to post themselves at the door have their hands on their weapons -- at leas they aren't drawing them. It's a terribly silly sort of affectation and not for the usual reasons -- clear enough to Lucien, anyway, from his slow-shuffling walk, uncertain squint, shaking hands, that Jax's furnace has been thoroughly extinguished. Halfway across the room his steps stutter -- he squints a little harder at the glass, skeptical. Then smooths at his drab khaki uniform and continues over. The smile on his face isn't nearly as bright as it would have been with its usual illusion-boost to smooth over exhaustion and lend it some color. He's picking up the phone, tucking it against his shoulder. Once Lucien picks up his end, Jax's voice is tired but amused. "Sugar, I'm real sorry, but I left your present at home. Think they'd let me pop back for it real quick?" "Mmm." Lucien is regarding the guards at the door with a studied intensity. Giving an earnest consideration to the question. "Poor planning on your part, but perhaps if you tell them it is a special occasion --?" "Hah!" This is sharp, and it's bright. As Jax twists in his seat to look back at the guards there's purpled bruising peeking out beneath the shifting edges of his khaki shirt. "Eyring," he says with a small flutter of fingers, slightly twitchy, slightly disgruntled when it produces no accompanying highlights, "an' Dirac alums -- gosh but you'd be." His nose scrunches as he turns back to face Lucien. "... actually you'd be fully unsurprised, prob'ly, how many these guards been recycled. Not a lot of big fans'a mine in here, sorry to say." He sounds light enough about it. "You could tell 'em, you're way more convincing. How you done got here in the first place, I ain't even seen my lawyers yet." Lucien's breathing has gone silent, across the canned sound of the faux-ne. His eyes trace slow along the edges of that bruising, but when Jax turns back he just hitches his brows, just turns up an elegant hand. "I looked extremely woebegone and told them somebody inconveniently left my best friend in here, and how else was I to celebrate. I am very convincing." His eyes have gotten quite large. Quite sad. He points, indicative. "You've capped yourself at half power with the enucleation or I really think you'd have a shot." Jax's fingers snap together, not very audible across the line but the shake of his head is dramatic. "I knew it. They done shoot me up with that anti-freak elixir cuz they know. If I could magic up another one'a these baby blues it'd be game over for these suckers." He slumps a little lower, a little wobblier, in his seat, head dropping heavy against the partition opposite his phone. His amusement is sinking, too, casting a few last wan rays over his pallid face before the laughter sets. "It's a real sorry party, honey-honey. Of all years you oughta be celebratin' you made it. This can't be where you want to be." There's a tightening, slow, but hard, Lucien's fingers squeezing tight at the clunky handset. He's staring a little too intent at Jax. Several long seconds, then pulling his eyes low and settling them on some meaningless scratch on the table in front of him. His forefinger taps at the table, steady and rhythmic, and eventually his deathgrip on the handset eases. "Oh --" seems almost involuntary, just a soft whisper of breath daring to escape him before he clamps down on that nonsense. "I very much doubt it is where you want to be, either. Had I my druthers we'd be in a better life altogether, but in the one we have --" He swallows, pressing his fingertips hard against the table as if this small leverage is what allows him to pull his eyes back up to Jax. "We make the best choices we can, non?" Jax's forefinger taps on his headset, in quiet rhythm with Lucien's. "Oh --" he's echoing, a little less quiet, and then, softer, "oh-oh-oh," his brow scrunching slowly as his eye flicks over Lucien. "You look like you're going through the wringer out there. Protip," he suggests solemnly, "if you get yourself throwed in jail a while, gives you a stretch can't nobody bother you with their problems." His hand shifts, starting half towards Lucien, but with nowhere to go, really, just drops heavy back to the table before reaching the glass. "Sometimes." He lifts a shoulder. "Sometimes we make real bad ones, and then --" His eye turns up, hand turns up, a little fatalistic in his indication of the surroundings. He's starting to rock idly in his seat and catches himself sharp, sitting a little stiffer and stiller in his chair. The smile he pulls up is quick and crooked. "-- then I guess we hope we made some real good ones 'bout our friends alongside the mess." "Have you seen your friends, darling," Lucien is breezing, lips twitching in a barely-stifled smile, "they are the terrible mess. I, on the other hand, have chosen mine impeccably. Aside from some --" His own brief glance around the room is less fatalistic and more lightly judgment, like he's sizing the place up for its decor. "-- minor logistical inconveniences, geographically speaking, but it's nothing that couldn't be solved with a relocation." "Mine look pretty fantastic from where I'm sitting." Jax is slouching slowly back to lean once more against the partition. "I know you ain't no lawyer, but." His hand is jittering, quicker, taptaptap taptaptap on the table in front of him. Light, though. Quiet. "Don't suppose you've heard no whispers 'bout if that's in the cards? Any time soon?" Smaller: "... any time at all?" "Oh, I've heard a great many whispers, but for the most part they've originated from politicians so I imagine by volume they're more lie than most." Lucien is glib, here, almost airy, but something in these words evaporates, condenses, splashes back to land heavier and colder than it began. He passes a hand down his face, shakes his head small and regretful. "It's difficult, toeing the line between appearing tough and appearing just, so close to the polls. Now that they have Done Something, I think a good contingent is hoping to simply quietly kick this to the next administration, in hopes they ship you off to Genosha or execute you in a show of strength. It would provide such good fodder the next time around to remind people why it will, again, be the most important election ever. A vocal few do want to trade you to Genosha -- not quite as badly as they would if the Magistrates still had Magneto on hand to swap, but they outstrip our military, even, in quite a lot of anti-mutant tech and might work out a deal with the DoD under the right conditions. Nobody," he says this soft and heavy, not quite like it's an apology but moreso like delivering a grim diagnosis, "wants this to come to trial." Across the fake phone call there is quiet. Jax's hand still taps in place, less rhythmic now and more just an unsteady shake. He closes his eye, his hair smooshing out of place against the partition as he nods heavily. "Next year..." His voice is unsteady, too. The words crack at it, fall through in pieces to the scarred table between them. Jax scrubs the heel of his hand fiercely across his face, dragging away the exhaustion that wants to claim him and painting a thin smile on the blank canvas left behind. "I'll hafta start saving up if I'mm'a get you a ticket to Genosha by then. Hear the beaches is nice." "Please. Do you think I like you enough to visit that wretched pit? Come Hanukkah you're getting a cake with a file in it and I expect you to make the best of it." Lucien's eyes tip up to the writing on the wall. He gives a quiet chuff. "Next year, you can damn well make it up to me."