Friends Forever

Participants:

logan_icon.gif teo_icon.gif

Scene Title Friends Forever
Synopsis Deal sealed. Squint a little, and it's even got overtures of friendship.
Date January 3, 2011

BrooklynRed Hook


It's cold. And sunny. An unkind combination where the distant orb of pure heat in the sky spares only white light instead of, say, warmth, the air crisp outside — especially in the morning, and this close to the river that runs between Brooklyn and Staten Island. Warehouses made colourful through vandalism, poverty and neglected crouch like oversized match boxes between parking spaces, docks and construction sites, and lone birds dip and weave amongst wooden pillars that are dry and weathered up top, crusted with salt and sealife where it submerges in ice cold water.

Logan has been here long enough for one coffee and one cigarette, the latter tossed out the window of his car that lurks at what he believes to be a discreet angle from a certain warehouse. A warehouse that has at least one street clothes clad fellow cigarette smoker who occasionally steps out into the sun to allegedly observe the scenery. Or watch for cops. Logan is at least not a cop, but his black closed roof sportscar might be a little too shiny for this corner of Red Hook.

Oh well. If he was being a master of discretion, he might not have invited Teo to join him. & bring tea earr1 grey had been a hopeful text message, because it is fucking cold even with his car heater going at a modest level of heat-giving.

Slightly stiff fingers work on getting his second smoke going. His right hand sometimes gives him as much trouble as his right leg does in arbitrary stiffness, improper (read: normal) healing from breaks and battering, due to being almost thirty. Sweater and jeans, a woolen coat, and leather gloves with the fingers scissored off make up his outfit, casual and comfortable without being scruffy.

Fingers on the glass, sudden as a housecat shooting out to freedom from the opened door of the unwary. Thump-thump. Teo's fingers are either numb or made of steel and armor, which given as many subtle fractures, calcified reformations and calluses he should have picked up over his lifetime, would be probable, if you didn't know the origin of this body. He hangs his face into view, a gray scarf and nondescript peacoat past that, belted jeans, utilitarian boots. He looks a little metro but tremendously. Is probably armed, somewhere.

There's a take-away cup holder in his hand, and two cups lodged firmly in the round grips of the wrinkly gray material. One has a slender wooden stirrer standing in it, the other presumably already doctored to its buyer's satisfaction. Teo is glancing at the warehouse a bit, and then staring expectantly through the window again, his brows faintly lofted. Possibly he thinks that bringing caffeinated beverages to a car parked outside a dubious-looking building looks incriminating. Or he's curious.

Well, Logan wouldn't have invited him if he didn't expect to risk irritating questions.

At the veriest leastest, Logan isn't immediately irritated by Teo's meer presence. A chin up of greeting that goes unverbalised, mouth occupied with sucking in a lungful of fresh smoke. There's the cuh-thunk of automatic locking mechanism, and it's not something Logan can do with his mind— he doesn't think so, anyway— but instead just pushes the lever with a free thumb, unarticulated invitation to get the fuck into the car.

When the passenger door first creaks open, he does, however, make sure he's the first to speak, drawing cigarette away from his mouth. "This took you long enough, didn't it?" The tea, the drugs, something — kind of vague, especially as there is no indicative glancing, Logan's focus fishing out the windshield.

"Cry more," the Sicilian suggests, letting himself into the car. It tips and rebounds very faintly as he sits down, arranging his feet on the patterned rubber, the drinks still balanced easily in one hand. "Shit's hard enough to get ahold of." Probably not talking about the tea. He pulls the door shut after him and then takes up the cup with the stirrer to offer the Englishman, gives him a tiny sealed cup of half-and-half and a packet of white sugar afterward. The smell of bergamot steams gently into the air retrapped inside the car with them.

"I'm glad to see you've been keeping busy." Snide, or factual? Stakeouts make that particular line kind of hazey in terms of mood, always, but there's no real bite to the observation anyway. Teo settles back in his seat instead of leaning forward to the windshield when he looks at the doorway of the building that's the subject of today's buttcramps and patience.

Doing Teo the kindness of opening the window a fraction, just enough to let smoke out even if it lets some warmth out— which is what the beverages are for— Logan takes the cup without looking over. As for cry more

Okay. He will!

"Do you've any idea what it was like for me on New Years fucking Eve?" is casually cranky, usual venom replaced with a sort of British indignation, somehow simultaneously good humoured while very much genuine in its ire. "It's not just one midnight, you know. Turn of midnight windshield wiping across the whole country for a good few hours, not to mention the rest of the bleeding world. Text messages, emails, like anyone truly gives a shit what their mates happen to be doing in the last few minutes of the worst fucking year I can fathom."

Logan cracks open his drink to inspect the contents, and that they are what he asked for. "I mean, why don't people go out anymore? What happened to normal human interaction?"

Teo's face goes e_e but he bears up under this onslaught of Cockney-Limey bitching pretty well, all things considered! He merely drinks his coffee, thinks about something else for a little while. Perhaps lying on a sandy beach in Bahamas beside Francois. Maybe when Francois gets back they will go. Or maybe when Francois gets back, they'll leave. He suspects that this place is getting to them, the way a stench of sufficient strength crawls its way molecule by molecule into the fibers of your hair, clothes, whether it's burnt matter or sewage, or maybe more like how living near nuclear waste changes your fucking DNA. While the vast majority of New York is not physically irradiated with particulates, sometimes he thinks the Bomb and the revelations that came afterward have poisoned every notion its residents think or print, tainted the metaphorical Kool-Aid of politics. And man, Winter sucks.

A conversationally awkward pause later, he realizes that Logan finished talking the duration of a conversationally awkward pause ago. Whoops. "Oh, yeah," he agrees abruptly. "Back when I was going to college it was already going that way. They mixed keggers and tequila races with programming tests. Then Apple came out with the iPhone, and that was it." He makes a finger-slice motion across his throat, and then realizes that these are actually accusations being laid at his door— ungh.

"Anyway I brought it. Half now, half after. Same interval, sorry. How's your tea?"

Awkward pause filled up with pale eyed expectant staring until Teo responds accordingly to the rules of normal human interaction. Satisfied, it's Logan's turn to tune out as he watches the warehouse some more, bringing tea up to sip without touching provided sweetening additions, huddled into his seat until the change of Teo's tone signals his attention is required, and jolts a shrug at the question about his tea. 's okay. It's tea.

"How much is half, exactly? And by what measure will you accept that the contract's cancelled short of me bringing along some Chinese chap to tell you so? I mean, 's far as I know, Dick's still not dead."

"Four days' worth of dosage before, three days after," Teo answers, with the same tremendously generous split. For goodwill. Apparently they have some goodwill. Enough to commiserate over the things they were totally just commiserating over, with soft feelings and sympathies. And stuff. "With two week's interval between where Dick keeps not dying and doesn't get any Chinese people trying to cap him. It's just a formality." He can afford nothing if not to be polite, after all! What's the worst thing Logan's ever done? Try to cut out Abigail's tongue?

No offense to either the girl in question or Deckard, but she did in the end grow it back. "Here it is." He reaches into his coat, pausing only for the length of time it takes to pop button, negotiate the snaggled teeth of the zipper. And then out comes a rather innocuous-looking box, the sort that people take newly-purchased sunglasses home from the store in, faux-leather black with a slight inward tuck to its lip. Even kind of goes with the weather. He holds it out.

There's a twitch at Logan's mouth that is both recognition for the numbers they'd laid out as well as some unhappiness with them, but he is nothing if not a businessman. He is several other things too, actually, but 'businessman' is in there somewhere. His partially gloved hand takes the case after wedging his cigarette into the corner of his mouth— away from Teo— and tea set down very carefully between his knees. As promised, the four doses glimmer up at him, strapped in.

But there's something wrong. The temperature of the car seems to practically go down by a few American degrees, if only metaphorically, as Logan ticks his stare over the contents. He steals the cigarette from out his mouth so as best to talk, and his voice has gone to a chillier, more customarily Logan kind place as opposed to mildly caffeinated 'I have been awake since 5 am and bored' chattiness just prior.

"I thought they came in pills."

When Teo blinks, the noise is nearly audible. He looks at the Englishman with a dent to the small gap between his eyebrows, a subtler expression than the ones that usually parade with horns and large floats (Eg. eyebrows) and confetti-cannoned colors across his younger-self's face. "I thought those went out with the Company," he answers, failing even to remember how he even knew that. He'd never taken suppression drugs. (One of him had dosed Alexander with some before he'd gone off to die on a podium in 2011, but—)

(—that's neither here nor there. That's not something he remembers at all.) "It's intravenous or pushed out into an aerosol as far as I've ever fucking seen," he says, and he can hear his voice flattening out already, defensive, wary, already on his guard. His shoulders up and locked into a square, trigger-finger itching automatically, but nothing in his hand except coffee. "And I've seen mutants get mowed down while crippled on this shit. You have a problem?"

A flat and still stare and the accompanying demeanor that supports it is marginally derailed by 'mutant', a word bandied around enough by the wrong kind of people for it to have Logan bridling just a fraction in a fashion he might not have before he witnessed the military execute five 'mutants' in a warehouse one November. Or at least snapping out of silent hostility in response to the corresponding defensive being built up into Teo's large~ shoulders and laddered brow. He drops his attention back to the four vials, a thumb running over the psuedo-glass curves as the question leveled his way is considered.

Does he have a problem? Junkies have problems. Junkies are widely known for having problems, and track marks, and a tendency to do all kinds of deals for a fix, and other connotations that needles share. "No," Logan responds, with the tone of someone who recognises that he's going to get no sympathy in this car. "I suppose I don't."

Snap: the case closes, gripped possessively in Logan's white and scarred fingers. "Do you?"

"I never have a problem," Teo answers, grandly. Making a joke out of it. It's the world's fault always! He's just the innocuous coffee runner for the various antiheroes and semi-villains of this story. Apparently. A moment, and then he makes the executive decision to relax his magnificent~ shoulders and lift his coffee to his mouth again, tipping its contents down his throat, finishing off the drink altogether too quickly to appear as if he expects to stay. He doesn't start opening the door right away, though, some middling approximation of manners to some other kind-of psychopath.

He scrubs the side of his neck with his fingernails, and then splays the hand over the heating vents to sap it in, providing the simplest reason for wanting to stay at all. "It'll be like insulin shots," he says, in a tone too neutral to be reassurance or encouragement. He is finalizing a deal, explaining his wares. "Small air bubbles are okay. You don't have to worry about your brain exploding or whatever if you see one of those in— that's a misnomer. It'll work faster this way than pills, too."

Logan's nose wrinkles. Instead of like a junkie, he can be like a diabetic, which is somehow worse. At least junkies are victims of their own design, for fuck's sake.

That's nice, though. That they work faster than pills. Pills seem to stretch the half-hour delay out like a long summer afternoon, and there's a twitch of concession in Logan's jaw. "Cheers," isn't cheerful but prim and just as polite as Teo's lack of swift abandonment. What to do now. Logan supposes the making out isn't an option and that would be too distracting while he's keeping busy anyway. Ash is flickered out the sliver of window he made for himself, before he inhales more poisonous smoke.

Reaches past Teo to lever open the glove box and toss the case inside. There's also a pistol clip inside, a map of New York City, and a bottle of codeine tablets, but all of this is shut out of sight with a flick of his wrist. "Thanks for the tea."

A nod from Sicily, and, "Sure." Not 'anytime,' although there's a brief hang to his jaw, pause, like he was about to maybe add it on, rote, but somehow with their history that would come off more like familiarity. He looked at the codeine tablets rather than the pistol clip, but there's nothing to say about that, or even about why Logan's doing his own dirty work, sitting out here, feet stiffening on the pedals.

"Pleasure doing business with you," he says, when he finally decides on what he could say that would be sincere and not a grinding query as to Logan's current relationship(/relations) with Hana. It's true. It was fun, not just the parts in Jersey with Eileen where he possibly nearly died under extravagantly Hitchockian circumstances, but the equitable exchange of goods and (hopefully) services. Nobody even died, unless poor Bill or whomever actually shat himself to death. He offers the Englishman a diplomatic hand, unblinking.

Too bad Teo didn't ask, because he might have taken some satisfaction out of the news that the last time Logan saw Hana, she kicked him in the penis, or a near enough proximity. If Logan were to be particularly sharing, anyway.

Uncomfortably, he looks down at the hand like a cat unaccustomed to getting petted might stare at the human stretching its appendage out in bemused apathy, but only for a moment. Thin but deceptively strong fingers and warmed leather-encased palm meet the business-like clasp, sans serotonin that usually comes like a promise during that press of flesh. But then, those subtle nudges of biochem only worked on this one so much. Hands go up, hands go down, and Logan considers the handshake over.

"Likewise," he allows, not insincerely. "Get out've my car."

Friends forever. Teo lets go of the other man's hand and opens the door with a ca-lunk of the locking mechanism, slings a boot out onto the snow with a soft paf of impact. Wary of losing his balance, he keeps a grip on the seat as he tips himself out properly, reestablishes full upright, glancing around in the brilliant sunshine once before back into the car. "Happy new year, John," he says, and then, too banally, "Luck with your resolutions."

With that, the door claps shut. He turns carefully and steps back out into the dip of snow in the middle of the sidewalk, blots a fresh footprint on the bunched snow smeared between two forebearers, and aims his empty cup into a trash can. Lands it cleanly, and passes his fingertips over the shadows under his eyes. He goes away.


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