Participants:
| Scene Title | Flint Deckard Saves The World |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | With Abby on her way out after a visit, Teo drops in to get to the bottom of the agreement Deckard made with Brian. He's also started putting together a plan to get Flint back on the street. Something along the lines of an extreme makeover. Deckard isn't thrilled about the idea. He might have to shave or get a haircut or something. :( |
| Date | November 29, 2008 |
"Take care Flint. God bless" There's a pause before she's walking back across the room, dropping a kiss on his cheek, provided the man doesn’t flee screaming something about cooties. "Stay in one piece please" Then she's back across the room.
Kissing Flint's cheek is a little like kissing sandpaper, and the process isn't made easier by the fact that there's an automatic turn of his head away from the gesture. No running or screaming, though.
The light's on for once, and there's an ironing board loaded down with a couple of sets of freshly washed and pressed clothes close to the desk, and Deckard, who is currently looking out through the wall and drinking in slacks and a wife beater. He has tattoos — 666 in faded blue across the left shoulder blade, and a snake roped thick around a cross in black on the right shoulder. Possibly others. Abigail looks like she might be on her way out.
Teo, on the other hand, is on his way in. He's wearing his usual onion-layering of shirts, hoodies, and jackets and things, and furthermore sporting a dash of color on his face: an ever so slightly broken nose. Slight, insofar as that it isn't going to ruin the line of his profile any further than his childhood quarrels had, but constituted a considerable amount of bleeding before, and adds a dash of vibrant red and purple across the bridge and his left cheek, where Brian's fist had registered for therapy. He makes several footfalls in the hallway before appearing in the door. His eyes go immediately to Abby, furtively jerk toward Deckard, and there's this pall of resignation that falls over his face—
"I was doing his ironing" Abby answers Teo. "Talking" drinking. It can be smelled on her breath. She takes in Teo, his face and the redhead gives a little sigh. She's too inebriated possibly to get all het up about the state of Teo's face. 'And I /was/ leaving but now, I'm not. Go sit" the process of undoing coat, and gloves, unwinding scarf started all over again.
Deckard watched Abby get dressed. He also watches her undress. This is probably surprising to no one.
"Hello, Teo." Fortunately, two and a half drinks in, he has the brainpower necessary to multitask. He can talk, drink, and watch all at the same time. "There's something different about you."
"I want to keep it," Teo asserts, after a moment, both corollary to Deckard's keen observation and a gentle objection to the healer's imperative. He adds an imploring hand to this reply, reaching out to tug Abby's elbow like an abashed child who found a bullfrog. Please, can't I? "For a little while." She'll understand, he thinks. She's offered to hold off before. Anyway, unless spontaneously tackled out the door or otherwise forcibly overruled, his attention is shifting back to Deckard, skewed undershirt and pointed stare, all. His mouth flattens slightly, either disapproval or amusement.
Both. Neither. "I'm here about Brian. And the books," he admits, cheek twitching around some reasonable facsimile of mirth. He steps in through the peeling doorway and shifts to the left, getting out of Abigail's way should she choose to leave. "Wanted to be sure you want to do this for him."
Exasperated sigh, but she's obeying, deigning to allow him to keep it, for now. "Two days, two days is all you get to show your badge, if it is a badge" Then there's a high giggle from her as she touches the bridge of his nose carefully. "He's going to read his books. He's gone to school, he knows how to read" Repeating Deckard’s admonishment from earlier. No getting redressed though, just Abby, taking a seat, sit and listen. That is unless she's told to get the hell out. She hasn't heard or seen Brian since.. the incident.
Eyes. Deckard has extra ones, tattooed inexpertly in under the ridge of his collarbones. Like the numbers on his back, they're blue. Faded. Old. And visible when he turns fully around to face them both once Abby has moved to join Teo.
He watches the exchange there blandly and without comment, attention not really honing out of its alcoholic fuzz until he's addressed directly. "You're a funny guy, Teo. Ever consider a career in comedy?" Nothing on the subject of Brian. Deckard seems to have developed a habit of forgetting he's been asked certain things, lately.
Happy hour was long ago enough that Teo is no longer under the influence of the round — or two — he had shared with Brian at Stinky Pete's. Instead, there's a pleasant throbbing where his face ought to be and a distinct awareness that Deckard's both drunk and evading the subject. Despite this, the first thing he looks at when Flint turns is his tattoos, instinctive, perhaps as a function of seeking out the other conversationalist's eyes in a verbal exchange. The second thing he does is remember Flint's eyes are up there. "They're good books. I considered Love In The Time Of Cholera, but I figured you could use a laugh." His hands curl in his pockets and he seems inclined to stare until Deckard remembers he's been asked the other thing.
'Is this going to be one of those conversations where Abigail needs to take her ass somewhere else, so the other drunk kids can talk?" Abby toys with the end of her scarf, regarding the other two warily. Alcohol or not running through her blood, she's unsure of whether there's hedging because of her being there or because Deckard’s clamming up again.
Deckard isn't drunk. Buzzed, maybe. Very buzzed. Quite buzzed. He's standing straight enough, anyway, glass painted amber in his lax grip. The worst kind of at ease, where he has booze in his blood and enough self-awareness to know not to say anything too stupid.
The result is a kind of smug half-smile. It may look slightly more nefarious than he intends, what, with scruff and half-dressed and tattoos and muscle and bone. "I think you should stay. In case I need to cram One Hundred Years of Solitude up Teo's ass." He tips up his glass for another sip, and pointedly does not remember. "Safety first."
It amuses Teo on more level than one, that Abby picks up on the omission of other answers as aptly as he had. She makes fun of her own obliviousness, sometimes. Shouldn't. "You're not in the way," he promises, glancing at her, sliver of tooth showing with a pinch of mirth where his bruise is, a crooked grin. "It was a yes-no question. Easy one, ought to be. I'm only asking it because I got the weird sense the answer was 'no,' so I wondered what the fuck was going on.
"Besides the lager." He sets his weight back on his heels, flattening his back on the wall, head back, humor pinning his mouth up, jaw coincidentally jutted. With the hood out over his jacket collar and garish injury, Teo probably looks slightly more the thug than what he intends, himself. The set to some terrible gangster film apparently just fell down around Abigail while she was coiling her scarf. "Maybe it's the other novel you should be wondering about, uomo."
"I'd rather you didn't shove it up his.. you know… there, because if you don't take it, then I’ll take it. it'll make him smile to see me reading something" Abby murmurs, drawing her knees up, dangling her arms out over them and looking back and forth between the pair. "Seriously though. I can leave. I have no work and.. I think I had like 2 too many glasses of" She points to the Crown royal.
"No," says Deckard, who chooses to make a staring contest of it before reaching (accommodatingly) for the second book. "Wait. Yes. What was the question again?" Brows knit in mock muddlement, he pops the poor book open to study the inner flap. "I won't shove anything up his you know. Have the people downstairs call you a cab."
Reassured that his rectum is in no kind of danger, Teo offers the redhead a nod of his head. "Ciao, bello.
"See you soon." The next moment, his skull rests on the wall again, with a thunk that actually sounds louder outside his head than inside. He slides down the plaster this time, sitting himself on his heels, low by the floor as he is ever inclined to be. Teo's face changes then, humor gone as if raked away by a squeedgee, leaving something like transparency with concern. "The question was: why did you think you needed permission to leave?" That wasn't the question, but it's relevant. Deckard's free to fuck around if he's willing to take his risks. The fact that he implied otherwise to Brian made Teo wonder.
The book is about children of India, born at the stroke of midnight on the day of the Partition, born with abilities as diverse as their ideas of what to do with them. Shit happens. The book is, its inner-flap continues to qualify extensively, famous.
"Because I've seen your faces and I know your names. Your personalities," Deckard tells the book, humor likewise stripped from the long angles of his face. What he sees inside the flap is enough to have him flip a few pages deeper, after a publishing date. Curious. "But that's your problem as much as it is mine. Of greater personal concern to me is whether or not you people are going to let me come back after I've been running around the city."
He'd thought Deckard would be. Curious. Teo drags a thumb along his jaw, feels stubble there nipping at the edge of his fingernail. He doesn't answer any of that directly; not yet, in any case. "Is it one of your haunts? The place you're going," he clarifies. "Could they be waiting there for you?"
It turns out, Midnight's Children was published in 1980. It won several of its considerable catalogue of awards in the next year, if the gloss and brazen crowing of its cover flap is to be believed. Other words are thrown about below the publication date. Keywords. Amnesia, India, magical realism, politics, prisoner, semi-autobiographical. Across from the copyright information, the table of contents lists over five hundred pages divided into three books. There is no dedication.
If this is a victory for Teo's speculative venture into trying to find something Deckard might be interested in reading, the older man gives no indication. He does flip it closed in his hand and then back onto the bed, though, which is a step above the desk, where 100 Years looks like it might stay for a while. "It's one I didn't go to while I was tagged. Just a cache. Not a living space. I might need to do a little looting too." Without the distraction of the book, he's forced to level his gaze across the room at thuggish Teo again while he drinks.
The new nose helps for some things. If Teo hadn't been forcibly divested of his place of employment, he probably would have tried harder for a different look, something respectable, with buttons down the front. Fortunately, his only current job involves, y'know. Flint Deckard. "They found you when you switched ratholes," he points out, without any real edge of argument. The younger man's own pale-eyed gaze shifts a little restlessly through the room, still under-furnished, yet showing signs of use. "Have you considered changing your appearance? Getting new ID? Temporarily," he presumes, allowing the vague possibility that these half-identified strangers won't end everything and all that the arms dealer was.
"Still don't know how," Deckard mutters, possibly to himself. A slow-drawn breath lifts under his ribs. The remains of round three are swirled low in the base of his glass. He looks back to the desk. "Maybe I'll just loot, then." A twitchy, wincing blink is spared the sound of ill tidings on the subject of his potential future. No reply.
That makes Teo wince, slightly. He doesn't particularly enjoy being paranoid and lacks the sadism to enjoy seeing others suffer in the grip of same. Discomfited, he fills in what he registers as dispirited silence with words. Practical ones. "You'll have to get back to life eventually, and I'd rather see you do it right. Clothes, hair, business contacts.
"We can get you a few. New name might be a good idea. Especially given, someday, I'm kind of hoping to market T-shirts that say, 'Flint Deckard Saves The World,'" he says, holding his hands up, fingers bent around square brackets that measure appropriately-sized silkscreen block letters. "Just to see the look on your face." With some luck— it would have improved in the interim. The look on Deckard's face. Teo looks up, part quizzical, a little furtive. The expression might lend one to think he were looking at the older man and hoping this isn't him in fifteen years.
Further elaboration doesn't do much to shake Flint out of his silence. He seems to be listening well enough, eyes clear and cold in their study of the desk and his crap sitting on top of it while Teo talks. The glass is eventually set down, still unfinished, but he uses the movement as a transition into looking back at Teo and his pretend letters.
"What is it you think you're going to have me sell? Toasters? Mattresses?" There's undeniable dejection there, flat in his voice despite the sarcastic flinch of his expression. Aware of it, he quiets again before trying a less relevant: "I didn't know I was saving the world. And Abby gave my keepers a name, today. Ferrymen. Two slips in as many hours."
"That's all right," Teo answers presently, though the Ferrymen might not think so. Not about Abby's slip, but he won't throw a fit; not when that much information was handed to him. His tone is a little off, too. And the stoop of his hands, knotted loosely, now, over the Puck-like bend of his knees. Make no mistake: pragmatic planning requires alacrity so there's nothing forced or sentimental about any of it, but for the awkward contrast to the glum fog that now enshrouds Deckard as if he's already dead. It's kind of hard to talk around, but fortunately, Teo's from Italy. He can talk whenever he wants to. "I'm sure some people would disagree with my interpretation.
"I'd just market the shirts anyway. There are pretty evil shitbags. You ratted them out. If the world doesn't end, you saved it. I think you should be allowed to see which one happens.
"So…" So. So, he's going to keep doing this. Squares his shoulders, despite the uncomfortable bite of plaster into his right shoulder blade. "You figured out before that this place isn't run on candy sales. It isn't run on a wedge in the toaster or mattress industries, either. I'll try to introduce you to some people." The Ferrymen, he means, but feels no special inclination to drop a name whose first mention was already harsh on his ears. Jesus Christ, Abby.
"Could have picked a better world to save." Resentment comes here in the form of filler while Deckard scrutinizes Teo's reaction. He lifts a hand to rub it over his jaw, considering the loss of his trusty stubble collection with evident distaste.
Meanwhile, the doom fog shows no signs of lifting. Past his study of Teo, he's at a chilly, stiff-shouldered remove, turning possibilities over in the back of his mind without stumbling over anything that manages to strike him as appealing.
Ugly truths sit in the back of Teo's mind. There's a Haitian that Phoenix could call, who would take this nightmare from Deckard's head; they could cut him loose, leave him to his luck, bank on the remote possibility that maybe those grandiose murderers out there would leave him be if he had nothing on anybody anymore. Unfortunately, Teo's little Sicilian brain's managed to figure out that if 'they' had a mentalist, they wouldn't have bugged Deckard, and the man's probably good enough at pretending ignorance to confuse the matter and undergo probable interrogation. Badly.
You can't do that to the man who saved the world. "Could have picked a worse one," he answers with an uncomfortable shift if his eyes, followed by a ginger unfolding of his tall frame, returning back to his full height. "At least there's Abby." It's a little funny. He's being a little funny. He isn't joking, though. They all have their virgins to celebrate, or something like that.
"Anyway, Brian can keep you safe. Better if you just go looting, but probably if you return to your cache. And you can come back afterward, if you're all still alive." Prognosis is good, his tone assures, making little ceremony of the implicit condition: that no Brian dies, either. None. "I hope you enjoy the books. They're both good," he says, with as convincing a facsimile of earnestness as he can muster. It's pretty good. Authentic. One Hundred Years Of Solitude is about a lot of things.
"Well. As long as Brian's there to keep me safe." As opposed to beating and tasering him for the flying monkeys to find, as might be expected given their prior relationship. Deckard scratches at the back of his neck, then the top of his head. Tweaky, twitchy when he turns from his station near the desk and the booze to head for the bed.
He doesn't seem inclined to further discuss the state of the world or what might be worth preserving in it, but reaches a hand up to tug the string on the light along the way. The room falls black around the blue of his eyes, leaving Teo to stumble out of the darkness on his own.
There is some overlap between this scene and the last one so that they both begin and end smoothly.
 November 29th: Harm's Reach |
Previously in this storyline… Next in this storyline… |
 November 29th: Enemy Of Your Enemy |