Participants:
| Scene Title | Everything's Good |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Deckard calls laaate at night and drunk in the hopes of someone not answering her phone. But the best laid plans of mice and men… |
| Date | March 2, 2010 |
Old Lucy's - Upstairs
It's late and it's dark and it's cold and Deckard is drunk.
So drunk.
It takes him a couple of tries to get the phone into the configuration where it's set to dial Abby and not some other random 'A' name — not that he has many of them actually programmed into the list. Static hisses and spits across the line at an unsteady, wavering whistle. That or he's hallucinating, but static seems like a stupid thing to waste a hallucination on and he waits it out, head rested slack in his upturned left hand. Reception tends to shitty out here in the middle of Midtown.
It doesn't take long, though. The number dials itself once he's tripped his thumb over the send button, and then it's ringing, mechanized trill muffled through metal and plastic all the way through his skull and densely against the brain somewhere under that. It's late. And it's cold.
And late.
Abby hasn't been minding late, of late. So when her phone rings, there's a glance to it. These days it could be anyone, but it's Flint, not Teo or someone from law enforcement and she reaches for the small pink thing, flipping it open and pressing talk.
"Flint?" Hopeful, so hopeful that it really is him.
"Hey." It's him. Even with a queer rustling and whistling howl shrill in the background, there's little mistaking the coarse rough of his voice across the line.
The silence that starts to stretch out after it is pretty characteristic too. He didn't actually expect her to pick up, and now the pre-decided message he was going to shamble out has vanished from his memory entirely.
"I was…ahh. I got your message."
"I'd hoped, that you might" Her voice is low, but the background noise is quiet. No hum of a computer, television, nothing. Just her laying back on a couch with a binder of protocols for who she works for open, and going through them. "I was worried about you." She's always worried about him.
A bit of a smile creeps up on her face and the rustle of paper as she closes the binder. "Joseph made it to Tennessee. I drove him to the airport to make sure he made it. One more, and he'll be even with me" She's trying to make a joke for his benefit. "How are you Flint?"
"Good," says Flint. At length. He swallows, tacky fingers adjusted around the phone with a vaguely velcro touch against existing white noise, of which there is still plenty. Wind rushes through his scrubby, short shorn hair in turbine blasts at the elevation he's at, some two hundred feet in the air. How tall is a twenty story building?
Ice glistens black off tar and concrete between drifts of dirty, ash-stained snow. He's in an icicle-slick lawn chair with a smudged bottle of tequila in his lap. There's just enough city light to distinguish stone from snow and his eyes once his left hand has fallen back to his knee, spectral, unblinking blue. "Everything's good." Mention of Joseph gets an unsteady flutter at his eyelids, as if he's struggling to remember the relevance, but he's smart enough not to ask. They talked recently. He remembers that.
"You haven't… had any Russians come near you have you?" Concern dots her voice. "That thing we did in Russia has sorta.. followed us home. They're taking potshots and sometimes succeeding at people close to us or ones we care about. Wouldn't.. put it past them to make a run for you" Abigail shifts on the couch, turning onto her side in a semi-curl, pinning the phone between her ear and the pillow so she can look out in the dim light towards the hall and the rest of her apartment. She stayed home tonight to deal with things. "Kozlow, Dreyfus, there's.. a man named Daiyu Feng, not Russian I'd guess"
Brows knit, Deckard blinks slow and stretches long down into a slouch in his chair, wind shrieking like a snarl of harpies through the nip and bite of snow and debris kicked up off the roof in irregular intervals. He doesn't say anything at all, but eventually lets his eyes roll closed while his long toes curl into fists in his boots and bits of ice sting against the long flank of his face. He hasn't met any Russians.
Could he have possibly fallen asleep? Does no answer mean no, haven't seen any crazy Russians? Oh those crazy Russians. Abigail pulls the phone away from her ear to check it, make sure the call is still connected and seeing that it is, pull sit back to her ear.
"Flint?" Asked quietly. "You fall asleep on me?"
"No." He's slow to answer, though, nose rankled against the damp cling of his collar at his neck in the sickly brown and black that defines most of the broken skyline out here. In his field of vision, he is seated on a platform that sinks into the blackness of the same nothing that defines every other direction for as far as he cares to imagine. There are no planes, no other buildings. There is no city. Just this chair, the rooftop and a few stories fading out dim under his seat.
"I should go. Everything's great."
"Please don't" Abigail's voice cuts quickly across the line.
"I just, it's good to hear your voice. I'm sorry I didn't get to see you at the Gala, I wish I had. I wish I'd known you were there. Might have asked your bosses to steal you for a dance. How, I mean, how's it going, without it. Joseph said you had your vision back. I'm glad you do. You deserve it. It was't fair of Case to take it from you"
Abigail's hands tighten around her phone, creaking from the grip. "They burned down my home in Louisiana. Momma and Dah, they're up here right now, so that it's easier to protect them. We're all over at Liz's. Because it's hard to even think of breaking in here, much less actually doing so"
More silence. Flint's fingers slip thickly around an icicle broken free of his chair's armrest, and there's frostier stuff forming white in the grizzle of his beard and through the scruff of his short-shorn hair. He tosses it away a dim glance later, dull colors masked under black and white for half an instant before they fade entirely.
He's holding the phone such that his breathing is still audible, hoarse and slow despite the cold. Occasionally there's a bristle like stubble on plastic. Then there's a more total kind of silence: one that doesn't include howling wind or scratchy breathing and is eventually replaced by the cruel drone of a dial tone after he's tossed the phone into a nearby drift of snow like a rock. In the morning he will probably wonder where he put it.
A sigh is all the dial tone gets from her and Abigail pulls the phone away, closing it softly and turning stare up at the ceiling for a long time.