Participants:
| Scene Title | Body Parts Are Nice |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Hooooney, my evil twin usurping my place in our bed is hooome. |
| Date | July 29, 2011 |
West Village: Maison d'Allegre
The brownstone home, number 57 on West 11th Street, is three floors tall, all old brown brickwork as the name implies. A curving stepped stoop leads up to the door, wrought iron barring it off from its neighbours, with the building's number in brass nailed into the painted wood without any glass inset to give a glimpse of the space within.
Once inside, the immediate hardwood foyer offers space to hang up coats and set aside shoes, with a wooden, open flight of stairs curving up into the second floor. The first opens up into three designated areas — a spacious livingroom with a rug of earthern tones thrown in the centre, a generous hearth set into the wall with traditional log-burning capabilities. The walls are exposed brickwork, lined with shelving of a slowly growing book collection. Next to it is a dining area defined as such by an oval dining table, generous and able to expand to sit up to eight people, and usually littered with too many things to be good to eat at until cleared. The kitchen is barred off from the rest with a counter, all stainless steel appliances and a sliding door that leads into a modest backyard. Tucked away to the right is a laundry, cramped but sufficient.
The second floor has more walls, closed off areas — a master bedroom with a connecting bathroom, a hallway that slides between the stairwell and said bathroom, into unfurnished open space that provides linen closets and such storage. The third floor is similar, if reversed, and almost designed to be its own separate apartment, with a bedroom and bathroom at the back of the house, an open social space with a squat coffeetable, and an open, unfurnished space with a balcony hanging off it, street-side. The stairwell spirals all the way up into rooftop access.
It's a warm night, and so Francois opens the windows.
The wind being shockingly cool to contrast when it whips on through in invisible relief, but subsiding to the usual damp humidity of the summer evening. It's the hour that Teo might get arrested if he's caught on his usual night-time wander, although with their records, Francois wouldn't wonder if he had no opportunity to bail out his fiancee at all. Confidence in the Sicilian's ninja skills manages to surpass any anxiety about what he's up to out there, and Francois doesn't think that the bed has cooled down properly yet when Teo had impressed a groove into the matress, although Francois could have just rolled over. The air outside is just cool enough that he isn't surprised, either, that someone would want to seek it, and wander through it, rather than share a humid bed.
It's been nice, though. To do that. The room has gradually become a bedroom again, instead of a sickbay, for all that healing has been exceptionally slow, and in the same manner with which he acts when life-changing things befall him, like time travel or Volken possessions, Francois hasn't done much to test his newfound ability to leave the house very much, except buy a few secondhand books. There is the impulsive desire to throw on some clothes — like a shirt, or pants you're not meant to sleep in, shoes — and go join Teo, but he doesn't know what direction to go, and the impulse fizzles out as fast as all the others.
Lingering by the window, he tilts his head at the sound of cop car siren, somewhere too distant to worry about.
Ninjutsu explains why there's a presence loping up behind Francois instead of passing first through the garden, clunking through the door, dropping an audible shoe one by one in the walkway, and pausing for a cup of caffeine-free tea then creaking up the stairs. None of that. Teodoro merely appears in the bedroom doorway, like someone had cut his silhouette out of a bit of black felt then dropped it on the scene. His black felt eyes watch Francois with interest and his black felt hands curl at his sides, flexing at the knuckles.
It's unfair somehow, he thinks, such a lovely thing being left all alone in his tower.
Cat-footed, he steals up behind the Frenchman, puts his nose up against the back of Francois' ear. Its carlidge is cold because it was outside, just a little, darkness having leeched all the Summer-time heat out of the air. His hand is heavy on the small of the other man's back while he leans forward, reaching for Francois' mouth, bends his arm to turn the man and make it easier, his arms tightening warmly, as much in search of shivers as to still them.
Paranoia is an immediate kind of thing, constantly on — house invasions, they happen, and have dramatic fallouts. But it's only a shy glimmer of a notion, beginning when he feels more than hears someone step up behind him, vanishes by the time there's an arm vining around his torso, chilled nose at his whole ear and a warm mouth to meet on the turn. Pleasant. Tension unlocks so Francois can shape himself into the embrace and kiss both, turning his back to the open window and the city spread out beyond it. A hand grips Teo's arm, the other finding a place on his cheek, then his neck.
He's spent a good month in fits and starts of over-warm fever, dragging on into an east coast heatwave, and in the relief of a night as pleasantly chilled as a good wine, Francois still seeks out offered warmth as if this were Russia again. There is more intellect in the hand at Teo's arm, discerning the weave of fabric as if it could tell him where he's been.
Muttered syllables are a greeting. The language is questionable but the tone is not.
Before the Frenchman's fingers slide off arm and past shoulder, Teo lifts his shoulder. Lifts Francois, too, hitching him away from the window and his view of the moon-lit path, the street in front of the brownstone. Never mind that. The room has, indeed, been too long a sick room and little recently the bedchamber of a couple of infatuated Europeans, after all.
Teo swings Francois around, a few inches off the floor; enough that the Frenchman needs to grab his shoulders, probably, something like a laugh pressed into the side of his neck. Maybe his shoulders are a little big, but then maybe Francois' hands have thinned out over the past few weeks, and he's wearing a jacket besides. A jacket, and then some. "Buona sera," he adds, or something like that, the words half-melted into Francois' skin like caramels left in the box, a smile curving palpably his shoulder shoulder.
The bed connects with Francois' back. Teo keeps kissing. Jaw, mouth; eyes, a lot, like maybe he doesn't think the Frenchman ought to be using them too much.
Hands with hooked fingers gather Teo up and with him after being deposited upon the bed and crinkled bedsheets, grip snagging on a belt to hitch hips up higher, other finding purchase on the back of a jacket. Francois plays the part of a receiver of kisses, mostly because he can't keep accurate track of what's happening, eyes shut and finding small opportunities to press his mouth against jaw line, throat, beneath Teo's ear. "I've missed you," doesn't sound quite drunk. Sobriety is involved, alertness and attention.
There is a mental alarm bell ringing, also, disconnected details, notions, but it's shrouded in muzzy, simplistic hedonism. Hands begin to work at the edges of Teo's clothing, figuring out what they are and what must be done to get them off, interspersed with diversions to seek warmth and skin.
The thin skin of Francois' throat is subject to a scrape of tooth then a trailing tongue, following veins, nipping, and all manner of other aggressively enthusiastic salacity, Teo's hands wandering down the Frenchman's belly, thumbs digging into his hips as his face presses into the other man's belly and it's all very—
— inconvenient, to realize there's an uncharacteristic layer of kevlar underneath the fabric of his coat, the webbing of a gun sling stretched around his shoulder, the buckle knotting up over a shoulderblade. More weapons than Teodoro ever wears out trekking past curfew. More weapons than his Teodoro ever wears out short of a Ferry-mandated operation, and surely Francois would have heard…
The muted hush of his pants sliding discreet friction off his hips now. The digital clock on the bedstand shines at him: 03:48, subscript AM. The side of the bed under his other elbow is still warm. This is all really quite…
Inconvenient.
Stupid animal 3: 48 AM needs demand Francois relax, could almost make him do so, but something even warmer and sharper drives up through his torso in the form of incoherent realisation, the emotional equivelant of a keyboard smash. Had he been thinking about it with more words, he might have self-deprecated himself into thinking that such a notion were impossible, but his thought process never makes it past conceit by the time he's reacting. A ridiculous, electrical jolt away from the other man, which translates into sliding up the bed an inch or three and spine curling in out of its relaxed slump across the mattress.
Twists, then, to fumble a hand over the light switch embedded into the base of the lamp just over there, a thing of dark, milky glass that's nice to read by or see if you're about to engage in sexually explicit activities with the wrong Teodoro Laudani. By.
For a moment, Teo gets a mouthful of pants-drawstrings, a fiber stuck in his tooth, and his rather handsomely-proportioned nose mooshed in a slightly uncomfortable, if not quite painful manner. His head pops back, upward, just in time for the light to come on and blank his face into a squint, a big hand coming up to shade his eyes. At least his hair's longer now. Ghost's hair. He looks a lot more like the hybrid than Francois remembers.
Yet different, still. Older, the lines around his eyes, those of his cheeks, jaw, heavier around the shoulders and little if any of it to do with excess. He regards Francois blankly, the acknowledgment of eyes as pale as slivered glass. What with his ninja-like gift for breathing subtly, there isn't much to him to betray any excitement he'd been feeling earlier, bar maybe, a little red around the ears. Teo always had expressive ears.
He blows his forelocks out of his face. "Morning," he says. In English. Which he always speaks, when he isn't pretending to be one that doesn't.
Francois isn't a ninja. Right now. Maybe not ever again, confidence shaken in the midst of bloody sickness and hallucinations of death, but more relevantly right now, breathing a little shallow and eyes still dark even in the flood of new lighting. On the thin side, since sickness, appetite not where it should be, sporadically scarred from belly to throat and left ear. And Teo— Ghost— is still close enough and low enough for his greeting to tickle breath against his skin, which also makes him within striking distance. Which Francois does. Strike. Lacking the room or correct angles for the kind of punch he's dealt Teo before, at least once—
It's an open handed slap that smarts across Ghost's temple, somewhat contemptuous as befits his age but not Ghost's, but with the prissy sting appropriate to jilted lover — though he is the opposite in both senses, at the moment. "Salaud."
He might do it again, or slump back and wish the situation away, but instead hovers in between to hike his pants up in a squirm.
Ah. Ghost's head jerks a fraction of an inch down and to the side, and a red accent begins to flush his forehead. He blinks once or twice, exaggeratedly, probably thinking about punching Francois in the penis judging from the bunching of his right arm, but no such assault is forthcoming. Instead, he sits up, backward a little, takes a deep breath that, deliberately or otherwise, swells him up like a hostile tomcat, staring hard at the Frenchman through surreally cold blue eyes.
"I'd say I wouldn't leave you alone all night if it were me, but that probably isn't true," he says. Teodoro reaches up to move his own hair out of his eyes with a little distaste, vain, albeit in a reasonably pragmatic sort of way. Too much hair; he doesn't know why Francois keeps his that way, either. "And I think I usually hog the covers. But you shouldn't have hit me. You kissed me back, and you're probably alive half because I told him what to do. I know why he leaves, you know."
It's a confronting stare. It's a confronting situation. Francois continues his slight crab walk-slither away across the bed without getting off of it nor breaking the far paler stare fixed on him. "I should have hit you again," he counters, voice quiet and rough, still breathless, although this is from an anxious tightness high in his chest by now. "Because you are still here."
Dread curdles away in amongst his guts, and it's probably visible in the pinching frown on Francois' face. What does Ghost mean by that? "I am engaged to him, not to all of you." He reaches passed himself to grip onto the mattress, lever himself over, ever slower and sluggish. Probably should get out and about so he'll feel like he'll have the energy to kick imposters in the face at crucial moments. Right now, he is focused on putting some distance where he had wanted none less than a minute prior to now. "But he hogs the covers as well."
Annoyed, possibly even affronted, Ghost stands up, a seamless swoop of movement. Sort of inadvertently looms at the same time, but maybe that's partly Francois' fault anyway, for making himself small at the other end of the bed. "He's avoiding people. Evidently. Not just because he's worried he might be a carrier for your disgusting plague anyway." Always one to pull his verbal punches. Teodoro stoops to straighten the bedsheets at the end of the bed, yanking them so they lie more evenly across the mattress. He probably should have guessed that covers-hogging is a commonality between all of them.
He pauses to leer a moment, for no other reason better, more mature, than the image that the converse of Francois' angry declaration paints. The next, the expression fades out, replaced by a bleak sort of patience. "You look better," the Sicilian says instead, looking at the window that he'd dragged the Frenchman away from.
"I feel better."
The bed is now between them, and Francois ducks down to pick up an unwashed button-down that was discarded before retiring to bed, self-consciously pulling it on, closing it off at a lazy minimum. He has not relaxed, his shoulders bunched and ready beneath cotton as he moves to pace, bare feet near soundless on the carpet. It's dark in here, the lamp throwing little more than a decent pool of reading light, low and hazy.
It's Teo's fault, really. Francois is astute enough to notice absence, self-centred enough to feel pangs of resentment when Teo isn't where he last put him, his ladies-in-waiting during sickness when the younger man could not break from his roaming, and it's been a while, now, that this has gone on. Ghost, if he'd been thinking about it at any length, could probably have worked this out some in the hungriness of kisses and grabs, willing pliancy and unquestioning hands. So Francois takes the bait: "Why else, then?"
Pale eyes move across Francois' face, left-to-right, then up and down, as if actually breaking down the Frenchman's expression into component-form for analysis. The ghost works in mysterious ways. Or mundane and embarrassingly explicable, just with elaborate cruel tricks as cover-up. He starts to walk around the room, looking at a few framed photos, into the laundry hamper, then the slight jumble of books Abigail had paged through while she'd been on-duty. He runs his fingers across the back of the wooden chair in the corner, too, checking for the hairline marks left by Eileen's companions.
Okay. That's enough of a torturous pause.
"We've always kind of worried about succumbing to monstrous compulsions," he says, "because of our juvenile records. Even when we weren't genetically reconstructed out of one of the most infamous multiple-murderers in the history of the world. These. Regimented precautions are probably sensible if a little exaggerated at times. It'll be like dating a garden gnome most of the time." Teo straightens the mirror on the wall, then stands aside to check Francois' expression in it.
Pale eyes move across Francois' face, left-to-right, then up and down, as if actually breaking down the Frenchman's expression into component-form for analysis. The ghost works in mysterious ways. Or mundane and embarrassingly explicable, just with elaborate cruel tricks as cover-up. He starts to walk around the room, looking at a few framed photos, into the laundry hamper, then the slight jumble of books Abigail had paged through while she'd been on-duty. He runs his fingers across the back of the wooden chair in the corner, too, checking for the hairline marks left by Eileen's companions.
Okay. That's enough of a torturous pause.
"We've always kind of worried about succumbing to monstrous compulsions," he says, "because of our juvenile records. Even when we weren't genetically reconstructed out of one of the most infamous multiple-murderers in the history of the world. These. Regimented precautions are probably sensible if a little exaggerated at times. It'll be like dating a garden gnome most of the time." Teo straightens the mirror on the wall, then stands aside to check Francois' expression in it.
It is a predictably schooled expression, with exception to the subtler nuances of a frown, intent stare. "Am I supposed to understand what that means?" Francois wonders out loud when silvered-blue stare catches in the reflection, forcing his greener one to shy away compulsively. He's still mad about. Kissing back.
And watching Ghost roam around the place, touching things. It's the same invasive posturing he's seen in others and bizarre how easily 'stranger' settles on what is more or less the shape of the man he goes to bed with most of every night. Francois mimics in his own way, but with a certain goal in mind — the engagement ring set down on bedside table is touched, a fingertip slipping through the silvery loop to skitter an inch sideways across the surface of the table, slightly out of sight, out of mind.
"Yes," the ghost retorts irritably, turning finally, to settle his bottom on the desk's edge. At least he takes care not to press it into any laptops, books, DVD cases, or writing paraphernelia. He reaches up to shift his coat on his shoulders, and glance at the window he is coincidentally in pretty good view of. He would guess that his analogue would do more than slap him once on the forehead. Then, "Maybe. He's probably worried that any day now he could try and smash Abby's head open on a table and fiddle the secret out of her mutant brain.
"Or Eileen's, Peyton's, any number of the male acquaintances you two happen to have. I'm not picking doe-eyed girls for the sake of exaggeration or anything." The Sicilian looks out the window. He does not seem especially surprised by the implication that they haven't discussed this yet. He adds, sidelong, "Nice ring."
Hand lifts of the ring as if discovering it were poisoned — more reaction to Ghost's words than any sudden feelings towards Teo. Francois doesn't know what to feel about Teo. The sheer complication of feeling about Teo is subsequently shelved as easier anger is quick to spark in clumsy misdirection, which refers to the fact that it's not Ghost's fault completely, what he's saying, and also the hard-back copy of The Inheritance of Loss misses the sociopath's skull by a few inches to take a chip out of the wall instead, rebounding to knock something off something else.
Followed by a few steps in the same trajectory of the book— that he only found to be so so anyway— as if to prove that he won't be simply throwing bedrooms items at the other man until he leaves. "I do not think he gave you what you have now only to haunt me." Context over content, is his point. "He would never have split if not— if not for you et l'autre."
Ahhh Ghost is being assaulted by books. He moves his head to the side, too prideful to move it any further than that, so it's just fortunate that the Frenchman wasn't quite on the mark anyway. Somewhat annoyed by this revelation, he gets up and starts toward Francois, unsure of what he wants to do, exactly, besides apparently seize the blankets under the Frenchman's toosh and yank them with a sudden violent yank of movement, ripping pressure-puckered edge of the linens out, flinging them at Francois all at once.
"You worked too long in the practical solutions to megalomaniacal mutants to pull off this waste of stupid hormones very well," he says, very loudly, very snobbilgy, trying not to seem actively offended about the wrong thing. He glares at the Frenchman then starts toward the doorway, finally, placing one boot very precisely in front of the next, his shoulders squaring into Francois' view, something of a dare for the other man to try and throw something else.
Ahhh Ghost is being assaulted by books. He moves his head to the side, too prideful to move it any further than that, so it's just fortunate that the Frenchman wasn't quite on the mark anyway. Somewhat annoyed by this revelation, he gets up and starts toward Francois, unsure of what he wants to do, exactly, besides apparently take the book from the lamp it had put to a list and fling it overhand it squarely into the Frenchman's chest.
"You worked too long in the practical solutions to megalomaniacal mutants to pull off this waste of stupid hormones very well," he says, very loudly, very snobbilgy, trying not to seem actively offended about the wrong thing. He glares at the Frenchman then starts toward the doorway, finally, placing one boot very precisely in front of the next, his shoulders squaring into Francois' view, something of a dare for the other man to try and throw something else.
The book is clumsily, thoughtlessly caught, and thereafter held pointlessly as Ghost makes to leave. Which is what Francois wanted, intellectually speaking. There are other instincts at play, the ones that are carefully honed against allowing one's fiance to shoot him a glare and turn his back like that, but they are ignored until at least he can hear the front door or the window or the trapdoor close behind vacating presence. Glancing down at the book, Francois opts to take it with him as he makes for the bedroom door himself — not to leave, but find a post somewhere else.
He wants something to read, at least, while he waits.