Everyone Except

Participants:

abby2_icon.gif deckard3_icon.gif

Scene Title Everyone Except
Synopsis Deckard retakes the reins long enough to vent about the Felix debacle before he vanishes back out into the night and Abigail endeavors to be understanding.
Date October 10, 2009

Old Lucy's: Upstairs


Tall, drawn, and already looking a few shades better than he did a week ago, Deckard might best be described as casually rumpled, which is somewhere above scruffily homeless and somewhere below clean shaven and buzzed down to a steel wool bristle. He's clean if not clean shaven, and decently rested if on the tired side now after a day spent wandering around — doing whatever it is Deckards or Francois do. Evidently it didn't involve much hard labor, because under the battered brown of his jacket he's in a blue-grey t-shirt, dark jeans, and the usual cowboy boots when he knocks twice at the frame of the door. Usual as in — usual for him. And not say, any person with too much self-respect to wear alligator hide boots.

Richard deposited to wherever it was that he needed to be, and now home for the evening, Abigail answers the door soon enough after the knock that comes on it, that disrupts the quiet of the evening. The smell of homemade caramel corn wafting through the apartment. Barefoot, jeans, tank top and red hair loose there's a measure of wariness at the sight of Deckard on the other side.

Part of her doesn't want to answer lest It be the one that's at the helm and here to give her some sort of lecture or what have you. Or maybe it's flint. Either way, it's not a fully open door but partially, blue eyes peering out through the face width of space she's offering. "Asshole at the helm or is it just you?"

Patient while she goes through the lookie loo process and he's left to inspect the wood of the door in idle turn, Deckard tucks his hands into his coat pockets while he waits. The leather's still cool from the weather outside, and his short shorn hair is ruffled enough that the wind is probably to blame. In any case, his expression is inscrutably mild once the door is finally opened and he's had a chance to look her over, blue eyes clear but not particularly intense in their scrutiny.

After a little too long, he pulls in a slow breath and sifts one shoulder up into a non-committal shrug. "Depends on which one you think is the asshole."

"If you have to ask that, you're not him. Thank god you're back and it's not the egotistical prick running things right now" She opens the door fully to let him in and to let the cat out, so that it can bound and bounce around the stairs in the vain hopes of being let into the bar to explore.

"close the door behind you. There's a present on the table for you" Present in question wrapped in wedding paper and a bow on it. Little bride and grooms arm in arm across the material. "I learned how you can get rid of it, give it back to me Flint, if you want to. All boils down to if you want to" Bare feet pad across the wood floor then rug that covers the polished timber. "Got that much out of it before it started moseying about town and taking you heavens only knows where. Did you need something to eat?"

Right boot lifted high to avoid tramping on any cat tails along the way, Deckard sidles in and closes the door behind himself as prompted, ignorant of the fact that he's shutting the cat into the stairwell at the same time. Or not. Someone'll probably let it back in eventually. Probably.

The trip inward isn't any more hurried or less awkward. It is more quiet! So that's something. Especially once he's gotten close enough to Cat's gift to realize that it's wrapped in wedding style paper and he's left to wonder if it's a joke or if he's really even supposed to touch it at all.

In the end he's left to stand next to the table it's on peering at it and then at Abby, who has just said a lot of stuff about 'it' that he's trying really hard to pretend that he didn't hear. Or he's gotten old enough that his hearing is going.

And she's heading into the kitchen, oblivious to the look, or ignoring it as much as he might be ignoring the box. Just the sound of cupboards opening, things being taken out so that she can dump the now dry clumps of caramel coated popcorn. Hard of hearing he isn't. Just favors silence over noise. She favors noise over silence. Silence has it's time and place. "I ate myself sick at the carnival. Huruma took me. I stayed at Hokuto's thanks to the curfew. Cotton candy till I needed a bottle of pepto, couple corn dogs. Fun house and bumper cars. Never really stepped foot in them, just usually watched from afar as we were passing when we visited other towns"

Bare feet sound off again and carry towards where older man and scary object lay in wait.

"Wedding present, from Cat. You can have it. Did you know we eloped?"

Ate myself sick, and Huruma took me sink in around the same time, which together pack enough of a whallop that Deckard has to blink hard to himself to clear out his head. His left hand falls almost automatically to the package top in search of something to distract himself with in lue of wondering aloud if she knows what Huruma normally gets up to in the deep and in the dark, but the tension of something gone unspoken writes itself out across his brow and in the fuzzy lines around his wire bristled jaw anyway.

"Still spending time with Hokuto?" is what he asks instead. On a horror scale running one to ten Huruma rates a nine and Hokuto rates a three and he knows it such that his next exhalation vents out into a muffled sigh while he tests the weight of the package in his hands. Back and forth, back and forth until she says the thing about it being a wedding present and it slows to more of a baaaaaack and fooooorrrrrthhh.

"I don't know anyone else who lives outside of Manhattan proper and my classes end at 9:30. It was either her or rent a hotel room for the night and stare at a ceiling. At least with Hokuto i'd have conversation and hot food in the morning" Abigail proffers in explanation. her own baby blues drift to how he's handling the fairly weighted package in his hands.

"She told Cat and Helena that she thought we were married. You know Cat. She also told her about the journal and so the woman who needs to know everything came sniffing around in the hopes of oh so subtly inquiring as to whether I had it and if she could look at it." Slender hand dips to pluck up a few pieces of caramel corn and offer them up to him to eat, takes from her hand, whatever he pleases. "But she didn't outright ask, so I didn't give it over and i'm disinclined to give it over to her. None of her business what's in the book"

She glances down to the box, then turns away, slinking for the couch where she can sit, pull her feet up and balance the bowl on her knee's. "You can have whatever it is"

Oh. Package weight balanced just so, it tips lengthwise from its platform in his right hand to balance flat across Flint's left. "Technically," he notes at length, "it's not any of Hokuto's business either. Whether or not we're fucking. Whether or not we're married. Whether or not anything's wrong with me. …Whether or not there's a journal about whether or not there's anything wrong with me that other people might want to read."

The caramel corn is dismissed with an automatic and slight shake of his head. Not interested. "Too heavy to be an alarm clock," is what he says next, oddly out of place in its neutrality while she moves for the couch. "Why'd you decide to color your hair?"

"Technically it's no ones business at all about what we're doing between the sheets, and yet" And yet people speculate. "Probably because their own bedsheets are lacking and they're jealous" Kernels start to make their way to her lips and consumed. There's some sappy drama on TV, quite possibly the notebook. The bane of all male existence.

"You don't like red?" That's not really answering the question. There's a glance down to the firey locks in question. "I can go back to blonde if you like. I don't care these days really. It's hair"

Not exactly the point though, is it? Flint lets it go, even if he does give the back of her head a sideways look. More mellow maybe than he really feels like being. The present is set down without being opened, wrapping somewhat crinkled post manhandling. Gonna take more than a brush of his hand to straighten it all out again.

"It looks good. The red, I mean. …It looks good blonde too." Hesitation there is fairly solid indication he realizes belatedly he might have stumbled into dangerous territory with this line of conversation, and he falls back into awkward silence with all the natural ease of a squid inking its way down into more comfortable (and lightless) depths.

"Flint, I'm not the kind of woman who is going to bean you upside the head with a shoe when I ask you if something makes me look fat and you tell me the god's honest truth."Abigail eyeballs him from her vantage point

"Maybe with a bible but not a shoe" lame attempt at a joke, she's sure of it. "Your lurking again. Haunting my apartment. There's food in the kitchen if your hungry or we can find something else to watch on TV or you know, if it's your turn for a need to escape, we can get in the SUV and just drive. Maybe to North Carolina this time" The bowl of popcorn is settled in the dip made by her legs as they're crossed. bare feet tucking under either thigh.

"I'm not lurking," comes off at more of a defensive mutter than he might have intended or hoped for, but in the step he's taken towards the couch and away from the table, he's rendered himself beyond easy reach of what distraction the package might have offered for the next however long he's here for. "I have a thing I'm supposed to be around for tomorrow." No driving away, in other words. Not that he needs a road trip to hide, these days.

"Is Leonard here?"

"Okay" Okay, he's not lurking. He's just doing the shake and listen to the wedding present. "No ones here. It's just me and you Flint. So no one else can hear me say thank you, for helping Felix. You didn't have to, and I don't know if you can ever understand how grateful I am that you did it, especially when even someone else couldn't do it"

Her head rests against the back of the couch to watch him from afar. "You going to come sit, relax? Or…? I won't bite flint. Really. I'm not upset with you or angry. I am with it but not you"

Yeah he can come over to the couch. Still wrapped present abandoned in its entirety, he paces his way around the far side of the couch to lower himself down somewhere around the middle. Which is, one might argue, a slight improvement over his usual habit of cramping up into the corner.

"You're the only one that took 'no' for an answer," is his initial reply once he's busied himself with the process of dragging his boots off one stiff jerk of leather and scale at a time. "I dunno what to do about everyone else. Setting them on fire seems disproportionately tasteless in light of recent events."

"I took no for an answer because you are not the only person in the world who can heal. There's Mrs. Hadley, and a myriad of others, I might have even gone and sold my soul to Mr. Linderman to heal him. I took no for an answer because I know that he's done terrible things to you and that you're not me"

Abigail shrugs just a little, inked shoulders lifting then falling. "I took no for an answer because if it was John Logan there, and you asked me to heal him, I would have said the same thing and walked away Flint. Just tell them you're not me. That it's you who has to sleep at night with who you are and what you do with it. Not them. That if they want someone healed so badly that you don't like, that they can go beg Daniel Linderman, or point them to Mrs. Hadley's bakery. She's a healer. She owns a bakery I haven't been to in ages. But she can heal people."

"So, every time I decide there's a reason someone shouldn't be saved, you're going to run off and martyr yourself off to a crime boss to have it done anyway?" The second boot is dropped with a hollow thunk after the first and Deckard sits up a little straighter against the couch back. Shoulders rolled and brows at a mild lilt, he even looks at her in all the room there is for a beat of silence, chilly eyes searching bleak across her face.

"Did you take no for an answer because I said no, or because you knew there might still be other options?"

"Did you come here for a fight Flint?" popcorn is all moved, maneuvered away from her lap and put to the side so that when she starts to shift and face towards him properly, there's nothing between them.

"What are you looking for from me right now? Are you hoping that I asked you first as a test? That I asked you first because the cost maybe wouldn't be as high? Because the cost would have been very high. Far higher than anyone else could have imagined i'm sure. I asked you because I know what it is capable of doing. Lord Flint, I only just thought of asking Daniel Linderman just now. I accepted no because…"

Slender fingers on delicate hands lift to rub across her face devoid of makeup and then run through her hair. "I took no for an answer because I love you enough to not want to rip what we have apart. I took no for an answer because I was selfish and willing to let the doctors do their own healing to make him better, because I didn't want to lose you"

"Four days after I told you I wouldn't do it, I woke up to a panicked voicemail from you saying you'd gone to another healer, accidentally killed Felix and sold your soul." Maybe he did come here looking for a fight. The 'I dunno' is silently conveyed all at once in a baffled look when he lifts his hand into an abortive gesture and winds up scrubbing at his scruffy head instead, eyes too blue in their hollow set. "Now you're talking about giving yourself up to fucking — Linderman — as a failsafe — do you think that kind of shit doesn't influence me?"

His hand lifts again almost as quick as it's fallen back to his lap, open-handed exasperation conveyed in a splay of bleached tendon and dry bone. "Do you think I don't care? Felix Ivanov is a two-faced son of a bitch who doesn't know whose side he's on and probably never will. He doesn't even blow with the wind; half the time he blows against it because he likes the way it feels on his ass while he has it hanging out the goddamn window — " He could probably go on, and may well, but there's a second or two of brow-hooded pause while he finally assimilates that last thing she said.

"It wasn't fucking Linderman I went to!" Abigail nearly yells it out, burying her face in her hands seconds after the outburst.

"It wasn't Linderman. Adam Monroe came to me. Adam Monroe's blood can heal people. He can inject them with it and they are healed. He gave Cardinal back his hand, but it couldn't help Ivanov. he started convulsing. It's Mu-Qians flesh. Same would have happened to me if Adam had tried to heal me. That's why I called. I'm sorry I called, I was freaking out. I was panicking and lately when I panic, I call you instead of calling teo, or calling Leonard or screaming out for god to deliver me from whatever is trying to gnaw at my head okay?!"

Up and down across her face she rubs, as if it might give her some relief and something to do with her hands. "It was Adam Monroe. He came to ask me something, return a statue that was stolen and I found out about his blood. A solution just fell into my lap. A supposed solution and i'm sorry if that phonecall made you go and heal Ivanov when you didn't want to. Heavens, I can't even remember what I said to you. I'm sorry okay. I'm grateful that you.. fixed my fucking mess, that you came to my rescue, like you always do because my good intentions fuck up."

"I'll try to use my head better in the future so that I don't.. put you in the position again. That you're not having to do something that everything in your being is revolting or.. or" Abigail shakes her head and looks away. "I fucked up that night flint. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you felt you had to clean it up after I asked you to. I shouldn't have"

Deckard's quiet for a while after that. Already spent or already intent on withdrawing or both. He eyes her for a while without blinking, jaw clamped and brow knit only for all three forces to eventually turn themselves harmlessly out onto the TV, which has very little to say for itself beyond the usual commercialized drone.

"It wasn't just you," is what he opts to say first, for better or for worse. His voice has dropped an octave and several notches in volume as well, down to a muttery, gravel-worn two from a nine. "Everyone has their own agenda. …Reasons for wanting him alive." Shitty, irritating, irrational reasons that chew tension into his shoulders like maggots through a dried out corpse and clench his hands together between the wide set of his knees with nearly enough force to crack bone. White strips fade to red beneath and between their rigid overlap when it finally slacks off a little.

"You shouldn't be sorry about the phone call." Maybe if it had been something he actually cared about he would've shown. Or replied at all. Anger has set to hardening at his hands and jawline again. It draws muscle out into fine wires down his neck and up the backs of his arms until they're cut off by jacket sleeves. Grits at his teeth set in within the narrow lock of his jaw.

"I dunno, Abigail. He should be dead and now he isn't. What do you want to talk about?"

"I want him alive because.. everyone deserves to live. If the lord wants him, the lord will take him no matter what it is that others will do to keep him here" Felix's days are numbered. That she wasn't the only one to ask Flint, that comes as a surprise. Surprise that's hidden behind her hands.

"I dunno. I don't know flint. I think i'm done talking for tonight. I'm still upset at it. I'm.. I just want to sit and be quiet for once. Watch whatever and then go to bed. I have church in the morning, on staten. I promise Pastor McCoy i'd show up and I want to see if Joseph will come with, or whether we're heading to another place"

Hands lower, dropping to her lap as she glances towards the television then starts to unfold legs, plant hands on the cushions and push herself off the couch. "Are you spending the night or going to go flirt with curfew and head out to your place?"

"God didn't save his life. I did." For all that he's quieted down, Deckard hasn't actually made much progress about the process of relaxing. Frustration is still carved deep into the harsh angles of his posture and expression and he hasn't looked back at her either, intent upon staring down some nothing place on the floor a few feet away. "People can change things. I could have said no and kept saying no. Teo's probably fucked over half the planet since he's been pissing in the flow of time and space and most of us are none the wiser."

When she moves to stand, he stays down, hunched on the couch with his elbows braced at his knees and his grizzled head stooped. "I'm not going back to my place. And you can't say everyone deserves to live with a qualifier. Everyone is everyone. John Logan among them."

"You saved his life" Abigail echoes, agreeing. Agreeing on that and reluctantly, on the second. She should be able to say that everyone deserves it. But not everyone deserves it. If everyone had, then Kazimir Volken would still be in whomever's body it was that he was in, instead of something akin to memory? In Peter Petrelli's body.

'You're right. I can't say that when I don't truly believe it" GEntle as can be, a hand comes to flint's shoulder to try and steer him around to lay back on the couch vertical, guide him or stop if he's resisting. "You'll stay here, you'll tell me what it was like, with the egotistical jerk running you around the city, and I'm going to lay beside you on the couch till I fall asleep. In the morning, i'll make waffles and maybe… I'll skip church. Something. I don't know"

"I don't remember what it was like. I wasn't there," spoken like it's the most matter-of-fact thing in the world, Deckard is disinclined to relax and even less disincline to lie down. He stays up solid against attempted guidance — even raises a hand to push hers off his shoulder if it seems like it may want to stick there. "I'm not staying here either. You shouldn't skip church to make me breakfast. If there is a God I've probably done enough blaspheming to keep him occupied for one evening."

"Okay" Resigned. Giving up, at least tonight. "You have a key. You know how to get it. You can have whatever Cat gave us, odds are, I already have one" She's retreating, pulling back so that he can be flint, instead of 'her flint' for however long he's going to need to be. "Be safe. Don't get hurt" He wasn't there. So Francois spoke the truth, Flint wasn't even aware at the time. Somehow, she doesn't like that at all. She hated it when it was done to her and the disorientation that came with it. Better to not know what you did as opposed to seeing it all?

Abigail pulls away at the resistance, letting him be and heading off towards her room. "Come around again, when you're ready. I'll be here" She'll always be there. It's a given.

Predictably, Deckard waits until she's had a few minutes to head off and resettle in her own space to pick himself up and put his boots back on. He manages to do it reasonably quietly, for which no one is really around to be grateful. Then he's picking up the (still wrapped) gift and out the door,


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