Doing Lines

Participants:

abby2_icon.gif leonard_icon.gif teo_icon.gif

Scene Title Doing Lines
Synopsis Abby leaves Teo an order via voicemail to get his ass down to Old Lucy's ASAP. He complies. They talk about her missing lover, his recent cocaine purchases from her mortal nemesis, the holy spirit that changed over from possessing her to possessing him, then quickly shift to discuss reading when the bulldog telekinetic who's practically her older brother grumps in. Mysterious old diaries are involved.
Date September 20, 2009

Old Lucy's

Old Lucy's has a vibrant and lively feel to it, from the dark wooden floors to the shady crimson walls lit up by neon lights and many times, the flashing of cameras from the oft-crowded floor. The mirror behind the bar reflects prices of various drinks, bottles lined up, as well as the entire saloon as seen from the bartenders; bolted-down stools line the other side, and there are loose tables and chairs placed all around, though many times they find themselves pushed back for more space within the center of the saloon. A few speakers are placed at strategic places and around a raised stage to the far corner from the bar. Above the counter, an obviously well-used bar is hung; it is this that the girls working will use should there be dancing, which is one reason many patrons choose to come aside from the drinks. Across the bar and near the back, there is a door that leads to the owner's office and just inside a stairwell that leads a apartment on the floor above the bar.


open. "Come on in. Before you freeze in the fall air and Leonard blames me for your nose falling off" Not that one can freeze their nose off in the early september morning air. Does this look like Antartica.

The door closes behind him when he comes in and the now red head - Yes Teo, she did visit the hairdresser again - Looks up and over at her friend. "Why is the guy who sleeps in my bed with me doing cocaine bought from the guy who had my tongue cut off?" uppppp go the eyebrows and across her chest go her arms to trap the white cardigan against her blue dress.

Ahhh. Uhhhh. Ummmmm. Parked several steps in through Old Lucy's front, now, Teo freezes in his tracks and goes diplomatically motionless, his eyes snapped down at her face and shoulders configured into the statue-perfect rectangle of an idealized person chiseled out of marble. He studies her for a few long seconds, before remembering to remoisturize his corneas with two, three rapid blinks.

"I'm not sure," he announces, finally. It's not a lie. Not exactly. He rubs a callused thumb on his earlobe, glances over at the heap and spread of old paper, pen and dictionary on the bartop, thinks to himself that it looks like what his desk did when he did translation work, except that doesn't make any sense so he doesn't ask. "I don't think he does hard drugs recreationally anymore, so there was probably— some other purpose."

Pain relief for eyeball excision, possibly. You know. Kids these days. "He could be helping Cardinal's informant connection," he adds, hazarding an onnnly eeever so slightly cringing sort of guess.

"Wrong answer" because it was Cardinal who told her and the guy wasn't collecting drugs for Richard. "Nice attempt to dodge or lie Teodoro" Hard blue eyes regard Teo. "I got directed to ask you since you're now his roommate. I'll thank the lord above that from what I heard, he wasn't at least taking a hooker home with him from Burlesque. Which, in a weeks time, you'll be taking me there."

She turns on a slippered heel and the scuffle of her feet lead to the bar and the pages, books and pencil laid out there. "He bought Cocaine, from Logan. While I love the man dearly, I don't love that he bought some of it from that man. Take that and add that he told me my ability is fucking him up i'm now really worried and about one question away from having you tell me where he lives or where he's squatting."

For all that Teo is a reflexively territorial and jealous little temporally confused bastard, he'd never really wished any difficulty between his erstwhile healer and his bromantic partner in crime. Being pressed by the great granite weight of conscience to disclose Deckard's secrets is almost as awkward as being compelled to take Abby to the Burlesque, which seems… equally if not more preposterous, and he can't believe— maybe he heard wrong. The phrasing fit awkwardly there. She doesn't want to go to the Burlesque. There are hookers there. And L There are hookers there.

Nice attempt to dodge or lie, Teodoro. His face falls slightly. Ignobly, he picks up his feet to follow her to the papery nest of intellectual pursuits she's set up above the beer tap. He hauls up one knee to rest on the stool, leans his elbows on the bar and absentmindedly begins to decipher Francois' cursive from upside-down. He knows it was Richard Cardinal who told her and the guy wasn't collecting drugs for Richard. Thus: his mistake is supposed to be exculpatory, not inculpatory.

He kind of forgot that the easy and not generally incorrect assumption is these days, as it often has been before, that he knows shit and is lying if he says he doesn't. An important detail. Difficult to maneuver around. Teo finally puts his hand on his face and pulllllls the elasticity of his skin askew, blinking. Fuck, fuck. Fuck it.

"He's okay," he says, finally, in a rush of air all at once, like air escaping out of a wilting balloon. "I think— well, he thinks he knows what he's doing, which may or may not be an actual change for the better. He'll be back soon. I'll tell him to call."

"Anyone doing cocaine is not okay" is snapped out at the Italian as she settles back on the stool with her laptop up and running, set to some obscure translation webage. The journal supposedly an accounting of Francois's time in the jungles and pursuing Kazimir. She'll try to make sense of it later, after she's done translating word by word of what's in french. "I already left him a message, despite Richard telling me not to. Why fuck does he need cocaine for? What could he possibly need it for? Is it because nothing else is working and he needs something to work, because if so, maybe he needs to go try some heroin. I hear that's realllll nice. Or that new blue stuff that some asshole was trying to deal in the bar."

That person soon found his stash broken, spilled and summarily ejected from her bar as well as the folks who were trying to buy it. No thank you, she wasn't gonna be letting people deal here and the staff were told to keep an eye out for it.

Yeah— yeah, okay, good point. Teo's gaze reels to the right, before turning, clicking back on-center. He rubs a broad thumb down the bridge of his nose, scuffs it around the bottom edge of his eye. She has a point. He's fairly liberal in his views of most things until he gets kneejerk Catholic about them, mind you, but cocaine use is only very occasionally the offhanded past-time of well-adjusted and unconcerned persons, and Flint Deckard has never done a very good job of appearing well-adjusted or unconcerned. "I don't know. I'm not sure. Dis—just a distraction, I think? Or for someone else?

"He was trying to help some people out. It won't be long." He can imagine that the absence of details is rather frustrating. He can imagine her reaching across the bar and sinking her nails into his face, giving a twist to emphasize how inadequate his words are, too, but not really. He gathers his fists on the counter, looks down at the roof of his knuckles, then up again. "This is a really fucking weird book you're reading," he hastens to add, after a quaver-beat.

"Not really, if you're me. Or Flint. Then it's not so weird" She's trying to get her temper under reigns and squish it down where it normally resides. Deep in the soles of her feet and nowhere near the surface that the last few days have been. Hand in hand with worry and fear. "Francois Allegre was the owner of my gift before me. From the looks of it, he's had it for, he had it for a long time" Long enough for Abby to so far surmise that if she had had it for a long time as him, she'd likely still look like she does now.
But let it not distract from the focus of her anger. Cocaine. Lover. Snorting. For a purpose suppsedly.

Really. For a purpose. "I'm not going to.. make love with a guy who turns around and snorts a line of coke. I'm not that kind of girl. I can ignore alcohol, and smoking and Marijuana" Because frankly, while she's not ever going to touch it, she's seen other on it and believes that flint's more relaxed times around her has likely been attributed to a little blunt.

Their supernatural do-gooding historical-translatory sleuthing vigilante-activism would be nothing without a little blunt, it's true. It helps Teo sleep at night, for instance. Annnd. This wouldn't be the time to discuss the benefits of illegal recreational substances, probably. A quick glance upward tells the Sicilian that this is true. Not even the inherently astonishing Francois Allegre seems enough to skew this conversation into safer territory. Teodoro pulls his mouth down around a loud, long canine sniff, scratches his thumb across the broad stroke of his eyebrow. Snorting for a purpose, it sounds like a punchline to a joke! :D

D:

"Clearly," he says, motioning with a hand, "this is a conversation that Deckard should be made aware he needs to have with you soon. But." His mouth closes an awkward fit around the first and last consonants of that word, uncertainty struggling to balance on the fulcrum of reason, logic, empathetic understanding. "Clearly— I mean you hear about that… the cocaine from whoever told you, and your first assumption, what you know is that he's snorting coke, because— there's a reason.

"And you're worried enough to start reading Western European chicken-scratch and find him an existential reason not to. If he stops… pissing around, and I think he will," Teo folds his elbows one over the other, treads hesitation as if it was deep water, "it'll be because of stuff like this. What you're doing. You'll take those reasons away, whether because you finally find the answer in the papers or— because you're it."

"you think that I'm reading this because I want to find the reason for him snorting powder? Oh, I'm sorry, maybe he's sprinkling it on his cheerio's in the vain hopes that it'll fatten him up. No Teo. I'm not reading this for the reasons you just listed off. I'm reading this because it's by the man who had this gift. because if anyone will know how to get it back to me, and get him back to how he should be, it will be this man who's long since dead and probably eaten by wild animals in the bayou"
Duh.

"Actually, I'd like to rather be ignorant of what exactly he's doing with cocaine. I wish Richard hadn't told me. So that I'm not sitting here hours before church wondering whether my pastor is still alive, and whether the guy I'm fucking is passed out or ODing on lines of coke and whether I'll see him again." Her lips compress. Lasso and reign it in. "I guess I just need to yell at someone and Richard proffered you up on a platter and didn't want me yelling at Flint"

He's always had a knack for being… on the platter. Teo doesn't have enough hair to blow back from his face under the pressure of her rather lengthy and loudly-articulated complaint, or it might have done precisely that. His face doesn't go all that pinched, more because Ghost's still riding with him than because Teo's learned fortitude in the face of apopleptic young female friends, but it's another couple seconds before he exhales, breathes something proper. "I think you're reading that because you want him to stop snorting powder.

"Which is a lot like reading this because you want to find the reason for him snorting powder, I guess, but not exactly. Switching people's abilities around isn't exactly the strong point in my academic reading. He's not going to OD."

He dwindles into a helpless silence for a moment, studying her where she's propped up above her reading with her mouth in a line as severely white as the other thing Deckard likes. He can't answer about Joseph. He went into the nightmares and found their king, he cut off fingers and got Raith Swissed, blew up a dozen novice paramilitary operatives, found Elisabeth naked and half-dead in the harbor, and he still can't answer about Joseph. Or Felix. "Do you want some help? I know French."

"I didn't know you knew french" She gone quiet, voice lowering now that she's gotten some of it off her shoulders and out of her system. "I could have gone to Cat but.." But just because you can remember everything, doesn't meant you need to know everything and Abigail doesn't feel the need for the dark haired woman to need to know this. Especially in light of the woman's thoughts and opinions on the matter. SO she'd plunked away at words she didn't know.

"Promise me, promise me that he's just doing that little bit of the white shit? That he's not gonna make it a habit? That I won't find him doing it in my bathroom" She plans on marching down to Burlesque and making damn sure that he won't be getting it from there. At least right now she is. She might loose her nerve later on. Or she still might go down there, but for completely different reasons.

Maybe even with a shotgun. Or a baseball bat. Would a taser be better?
The folder with it's papers and her post it note sheets is slid over to the other man. Footnotes on the pages correlating to the post it paper attached to the respective pages mark her translations. Maybe he's succeeding in getting her off of the deckard/cocaine tangent.

It shouldn't be this easy. Maybe that means Teo's ly-ing, or else overstepping, but he thinks it's true. He's seen Deckard at some of his worst, read the prescriptions that put Deckard at his best. Of all things: he doesn't think cocaine is going to be the new healer's greatest demon. "I promise," he says. "Cocaine won't be a habit."

The expedition to Burlesque is a topic left, thankfully, for another time.

Teodoro is grateful for even the briefest, shortest-lived distraction from the previous topic. Teo casts his eyes down on the page, scales through laddered text in flowing script. 'Chicken scratch' had been a rather rude assessment. "Guy was educated," he observes, after a moment. "Some anachronisms here, but—" He turns the page with a press of one forefinger on the paper. "This was all relatively recent. I know a lot of languages." There's almost a tinge of pride in his voice, and the brief glance upward, a geometric tangent of early morning light through the plateglass paling his eyes further even than the usual sterile blank of chipped ice that his pupils usually steep in.

When he gets back to reading, his face changes slightly. He looks up again, brow faintly notched and furrowed. "He wasn't— an ancestor of yours or anything, was he?" How did you get it?

Educated. They aren't talking about Leo, clearly. There's the creak of the door opening, and a very weary looking Leonard comes creeping in. He's not dressed in his rent-a-cop uniform, but in t-shirt, jeans, and boots, backpack slung over his shoulder with his uniform in it. He shuts the door behind him, very gently, apparently not realizing that Abby is already up and awake. When he hearsthe sound of voices, he pauses, blinks blearily.

"Not an ancestor" Abigails forefinger taps on the bar top as Teo takes a gander. "I met him when I was five. He was who gave me god's gift. Supposedly. Hiro met him in the past, and told me about him, I asked my Dah who told me I met someone with his name out in the woods behind my house when I was five. The posessor of the gift, before me, that Flint has now. This man went.. everywhere, just following Kazimir, trying to find him, trying to…" Find a way to kill him?

Her toast with peanut butter is cold by now but she doesn't care and finally picks it up as Leonard is escaping for work. "Hey" Offered to Leonard. At least he came in after the cocaine bit. Lest Decakrd find a foot in his groin and being castrated by her loyal roommate and friend avenging Abigail's honor or some other such reason.

It's good to know that Abby doesn't want to see her beau telekinetically castrated! That's kind of like— hope. Teo isn't going to stare straight at it, in case it's one of those things that will vanish into the ether or take stain once you do, like a leprechaun, or a unicorn, or an angel. Oh, he has that wrong, a second. Angels don't disappear, they make you blind. "Ciao, Leo.

"Abby's doing extracurricular reading." The photocopies are caught up between forefinger and thumb, flipped at him a brief moment, salute and hello, before he glances back down at them again. He isn't sure if he's supposed to be able to talk about that incredible temporal clusterfuck with Leonard around. That might be Abby's business and Flint's but not Leonard's. Difficult to say. He starts to say something else, but whatever he's reading kills the words in his throat. There's a rasp of breath, an arhythmic cough. His throat works a swallow down.

Leo's weary, but not bitter. Just a little footsore. Sure of his welcome, he advances to sit down by Abby. "About the hand of god, or whatever it is, that's passed from her?" he wonders, stretching to make his back pop, grunting with the effort. An odd statement, for an avowed atheist. He props his head in his hands, balances the weight against the heels, as if his eyes hurt. "Hey, T," he says, resurrecting that nickname.

"Leo knows. I've talked with him about it" Giving Teo permission to say whatever it was that he was going to say. Even going so far as to lean and peer at her papers with raised brows that match the shade of her hair when he coughs. She glances ebtween Leo and Teo, brows furrowing in worry as they descend from their lofty perch. "Whats wrong?"

'Nothing' is the automatic answer that Teo is sensible enough to forestall. He shakes his head instead, filling in the brief space of time before he can cobble together the words to reply aloud, quirks a half-grin for the whole hand of God or whatever it is that was passed from her. "Yeah. I mean, it's just— in this thing, this entry he's talking about how he listened to Hiro. When Hiro went back in time." March 2, 1978. He gives the edge fo the page nudge with blunt nails, scooting the bold black script closer to Abigail where she can see.

His name, if nothing else. '…j'ai ecoute Hiro et ses compagnon…' "Seems like Hiro told him not to try and kill him, even— if he had the chance. So Francois followed Kazimir, for years I guess. Saw what he did the world over. In South America, there was a kid: a precog it sounds like, so Volken… It's not the answer you're looking for," he adds, glancing at Abby apologetically, scrawling a scratch of blunt fingers up behind his ear, wearily. "It's nothing exciting. Just reminded me of some shit.

"Kind of heavy reading." He lifts his brows, tries to make facetious out of it, even as he reaches across the bar to sit the heel of his hand against one of Leo's eyelids.

It makes Leo's face go slack a little, with relief. "I could use some ice," he mumbles. "So, Volken had a foe. Or a pursuer. Or a chronicler?" Broad shoulders sag, and he rubs at his scalp, pushing the nap there into disarray.

"I knew that already" Sorta. Not that Hiro told him to not take a try at Volken. "Reminded you of what?" Abigail reads on even though she's somewhat disappointed at the answer from Teo. Surely this isn't just about him following Volken. Surely there's something about how to move the ability from one person to the other. "You're not just saying that to make me stop reading it are you?" Teo is evil eye'd before she pushes the coffee cup towards Leonard for him to drink from if he wants.

Leonard is going to be unavailable to drink coffee for a few minutes, while Teo sets about drawing his thumbs down the lines under his eyes then the corners, palming his cheeks and rumpling heavy fingers through his hair, finally hooking the corners of Leo's mouth with the pressure of callused forefingers and compelling them up into a smile. Despite the teasing parody, it's a little tenderer than the tousling affection one would show an actual dog, and both his companions probably know better than to think that that can be attributed entirely to the fact that human skin and sensibilities are a little more delicate than your average mutt's.

"I can look into it some more, if you want," he adds, distractedly. He drops one hand, flicks through the dark points of Leonard's hair with the other, setting them to their best approximation of rights. "I only read a page. Do you have any later diaries? Closer to the time that he met you? Do you know— how that worked?"

And Leo leans into it, canine in his own fashion, for certain. The caress is pleasant, and has him smiling in earnest, albeit rather dreamily. A wilted approximation of his usual grin. "How'd you get this diary?"

"Through a bookstore owner and then the good graces of Eileen" A glance fixed on Leonard. "She has access to upstairs, so if she ever comes by, to hide out, please, be nice. That's all I ask. I know it's your home too but she had a key to the place before even we moved up there" But down to the book and a cant of her head to the side. "There's more than one?" She thought this was the only one. "It didn't occur for me to look for more" But, now that she knows. "I don't know how giving it to someone would work. I can't remember when I was five years old and what he did to me. I was hoping that the journal would tell me. So that Flint can try it. If he wants it."

The papers are shuffled, kept in their proper order and folder closed. "Off to work Leo?"

A shrug pushes up through Teo's shoulder as he leans into his elbow, finishing off the reassembly of Leonard's fancy-fancy hairdo with a swift carding of splayed fingers. A chuck of a thumb upside Leo's chin states that the masterpiece is complete. The veteran now looks somewhere between orderly and fashionably tousled. "People who keep diaries as fastidiously as this guy did generally do it for longer than this one has room to cover. I figure there are probably others, si." He regroups the pages between his hands, starts shuffling them into an even-edged pile. Doesn't say a word about Eileen, though his silence in and of itself is probably conspicuous.

"Home from work," Leo corrects, affably. "Eileen?" he wonders, perhaps too tired to bristle at that name as he might usually. "Why?" The mention of a key has him stiffening. Perhaps LEo may be finding a new place to sleep, sometime soon, but he doesn't protest aloud. Not much hair there to rearrange - he keeps clipping it short, even as winter comes on.

"Because. But I don't expect her to use it. I don't think she's ever used the key actually" Abby frowns at that. "Hey, uh.. why would Peter Petrelli be .. staring at me across a table" She glances between the two in the vain hopes that either might know the magic answer. "Eileen said he'd probably like to talk with me and was gonna send him by the bar."

A figurative question mark writes itself on Teo's face. He glances at Leonard, then back at the young woman. "I don't know," he answers, finally. "Far as I'm aware, you two were never friends." Are never friends, he'd say but it's always disconcerting to hear the ghost's words out of Teo's mouth so he avoids that. Just as he diligently avoids inviting Leonard over to crash; be disrespectful given not even Abby knows where Deckard's gopher hole is, at this point. "He might have some of the same questions you do, I guess.

"I hear he has Kazimir's ability now." There's a quizzical glance up, spanning the space between his companions. The only theory he can think of. "Fucked up somebody's face with it defending allies the other week, but I hear it's been giving him some trouble. Maybe he wants to get rid of it."

Leonard's lip curls at that. Petrelli. Public Douchebag no 1. But he refrains from saying it aloud. "Give it to me. Either of them. Give me both, let me self annihilate and take all the trouble out of the world," he says, wearily, hanging his head. "Maybe that's the solution. Matter and anti-matter. Or an exorcism. If this isn't Evolved power we're talking about, and clearly they aren't, either of them…..maybe we need something more. Magic. Religion."

Wow. Wow, it's in Peter Petrelli now. That would explain the stare and the look. Explains everything that Eileen was telling her the other night and why she said the three of them should get together. She suddenly looks very uncomfortable in that knowledge. Uncomfortable enough to flip the folder once Teo's done and finish the last bite of her toast and grabs her coffee. "Do you want me to take the …" No, she's not going to finish that sentance. "Leo, there should be pancakes in the freezer upstairs. Take Teo, go have breakfast. I need to get to church, maybe i'll make the early service" She can wing by Hokuto's after and see if she can get the woman's help in tracking down more of hte journals. If he has more.

It'd be reflex for Teo to take orders from the woman, just get up, go and do, but he's slowed by that look on her face. The discomfort. There's something missing from what she told them then, if not from the events recalled then some flavor, taint of atmosphere, suspicion or ambient concern. He glances down at the papers she's taken back, pulls himself off his stool in what would appear to be the beginning of acquiescence. He does pause, though. Ask: "Keep me updated?" He snags the backpack off the floor, Leonard's, tugs it up over his shoulder. Always one to be helpful. He thinks Leonard's joking about the other thing, assumes he is, so he doesn't reply.

"…..is that the solution?" Leo wonders, not really to either of them in particular. To empty air, perhaps, and the morning sunbeam that is inching its way along the woodfloor, heading for the bar and an ethereal drink, maybe. "To put them in one body, really have them complete or destroy each other?" He shakes his head, as if to clear it, looks to Abby. "Thanks."

"That's not the solution Leonard" Abby answers. "The answer is whatever will get it back to me. That's what the answer is" The folder is stuffed under the bar, her own purse picked up and kisses dropped on either man's cheeks. "Rest well. Sleep well. Don't worry about me I won't be back for hours." aka, have fun. Not that someone's broken you know what might magically fix itself. And she turns, on her heel, heading for the door out and to church beyond.

That bizarre ability territoriality leaves Teo staring as the woman leaves, scattering dagger-edged heel-falls on the floor. He says nothing for a moment, trying to come up with a suitable explanation for the telekinetic what— just— happened, with Deckard, and the cocaine, without actually mentioning Deckard or the cocaine. It's evident that Abigail Beauchamp is out of sorts, though. "I'm not sure it's even about being God's chosen anymore," he notes, after a moment, blankly. He reaches his arm underneath the bar's ingress panel, pulls it up to step behind. Holds it there, letting Leo space to follow. "She goes to church, but she hasn't mentioned Him in awhile. I don't know. I think she really misses that about herself."

"Yes," Leo says, quietly. He follows, obediently, squinting against an incipient headache.

The bar panel thunks back down after Leonard, and the Sicilian latches it even as Abigail's exeunt is punctuated by a fussing and clicking of the key shutting up inside. "What's wrong with you today?" the question's kinda joking, kinda not. Joking enough to keep it from being specifically rude. He lumps his arm around the telekinetic's neck and hauls him toward the stairs.

"Not enough sleep," Leo says, sheepishly, as he drags his feet up the stairs. "I just need breakfast, and nap, and I'll be right as rain."


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