Participants:
| Scene Title | Hanging |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Cleaning out a few last bits of bric-a-brac at the old dispensary, Delilah and Leonard unexpectedly run into Ghost on a tourist trip. Idle companionship gets kind of tense, but in the end, all three are still left— |
| Date | July 10, 2009 |
Staten Island — Old Dispensary
On the outside, this sprawling multi-level complex has not seen use in many years, its walls covered in greenery and stone exterior and glass windows showing evidence of disrepair. Surrounded by a chain link fence, a drive leads from the street to a large dock, and around the back one can expect to find more sprawling greenery that eventually leads to a concrete drop off into the Atlantic Ocean.
Passing through the chainlink fence and into the dispensary will reveal that the aged and crumbling outside is a facade. The loading dock is kept clear for the most part of everything save vehicles and supplies, though a section has been quartered off and transformed into an open workshop. The dispensary itself has been transformed into something akin to a makeshift dormitory, complete with common areas, a sizable kitchen and eating area, with various rooms converted into bedrooms for the residence. One room has even been set up as a makeshift clinic, amply stocked with supplies.
The back lawn and garden of the dispensary is surprisingly well tended, green and lush during the right months. Vegetables have been planted in accordance to season closer to the building, though someone has indulgently planted a plots of flowers - notably sunflowers - here and there. Further out, the ground drops a little and makes it to a concrete edge from which opens out into deeper water of the Atlantic.
Leo is doing the lifting. He doesn't even break a sweat, beyond that native to anyone moving around in the heat of a summer evening. It has his t-shirt stuck to him, and him making that feline expression of displeasure. I want a shower. But the last of the stuff is floating towards the van, Sorcerer's Apprentice style, as he watches, moving a hand slowly like he's wiping off a blackboard.
Delilah has crawled from the driver's seat into the back of the van, on the receiving end of whatever happens to be floating in at the time. She makes sure everything moves into its proper tetris-y place before settling the next one in. Can fit more back here this way, right? She stands at the open doors, one knee up on the edge of the vehicle floor as she guides an unmarked cardboard box into its proper spot. Unlike poor Leo, all sweaty and unpleasant in his mood, Delilah seems to have not been bothered much at all for some reason. A pink shirt, a blue and pink skirt, bright in the evening light. Closer inspection yields that her shirt is covered in pieces of toast. With cute faces. One has a jar in its hand. 'We be Jammin''.
It is terribly cute. The bee skirt is going to haunt his dreams in a way that neither Iraq nor Teo without his shirt on does. He lets the most recent of the crates sink down, sits down himself. "Goddamn, but I get a headache," he says.
Scraping, and then a conspicuous, hollow-boned silence. There's someone standing in the rearview mirror, a face as recognizable as it is unfamiliar. Dark hair, pale eyes. Leaning idly on a walking cane, pleasant silence presiding over the lean lines of his frame, his weight shifted casually onto his left foot, as if he's been parked there for longer and more lazily than he really has.
He doesn't say or do anything until Delilah sees him, and despite that he honestly is a few yards too far to see the miniaturized reflection of her face on the strip above the dash, he smiles, reflexively, right on cue.
"I told you that I could have helped…" But knowing Leo, he just wandered off to get everything instead of listening to a word she said. Delilah perches still, rearranging something in a very nitpicking way. "Do you need an aspirin or anything? Hmm. Does that even help?"
And as she shifts up into the space between the front seats- the figure reflected in the mirror catches her eyes. Thankfully, he is indeed close enough so that his smile breaks clearly in the glass as well. Perhaps her least thought out movement of the day, the redhead pauses, still in the back between boxes, and whirls her torso around to look for the man in the mirror. Lilah's own smile is vague, and it appears that she is unsure of the right reaction to him.
Leo turns with dreamlike slowness in the dust of the yard….and the dust whirls up around him, like he suddenly realized he's the incarnation of Pigpen. The man in question will find himself snatched up to hover in midair like a hung-up overcoat. "You," he says, flatly.
There's only a breath of an instant for the ghost to brace, and brace he does, predicting the serrated outlash of telekinetic power even before the dust smears opaque into the air and mindheld force inverses against gravity. Suddenly, he's floating. Not for the first time, certainly not the last.
Naturally, he looks down. Mostly because he's not supposed to.
"It's good to see you," he says, in his nicest, most kindest indoors voice. He lifts his head, shears his attention through the hollow-eyed carcass of the derelict dispensary, the last of its guts loaded up into the van.
For a few seconds of Ghost floating up in the air, Delilah is suddenly at a loss of what to do, or what to say. Finally, she slides forward out of the back of the van, her hand moving to rest on the side of Leo's arm. Not the best idea, technically, but hey. "Please put him down-"
"Not yet," Leo says. He's sweating again, flushed, it does nothing for him. "What do you want?" he says, looking up at Ghost fiercely. The dust begins to settle, at least.
Still floating, then. Ghost brings his eyes back from the dispensary, and his memory back from trying to recall where the fuck that wing was, the one he'd found Conrad fixing the floor in. The whole place had smelled of new plaster, chalky, velvety as sterile dust with none of the itch. He can't remember very well about that, or a lot of other things. "Nothing from you.
"Just wanted to see if Wozniak's old digs were still standing. When I come from, it's a fucking crater."
Lilah is on the fence when it comes to realizing if Leo knows who exactly Ghost is, so she doesn't say anything about it- or about why the future version of a friend is hanging around, watching them pack things into a van. So to make up for it, she shifts to look at him from the side, and then gives the rangy lion that is Leo one of her most authoritative sort of looks (a look better suited for 'tuck your shirt in' or 'do the damn dishes', but still worth a try), pursing her lips. "Will you please put him down?
Okay, down. He can do down. Gently, Ghost is deposited on his feet, but held nonetheless. "You know who that is, D?" he demands, flicking a dark glance at her. "Yeah, I know, you come from the Mad Max future," he says, in a low growl.
Who is 'Mad Max?' Teo still doesn't know. He'd never watched much television or, um, if that even is television, and the ghost had spared even less time to do so. He doesn't say anything because, you know. They're talking to each other, and he has been kindly installed upon his feet. Very nicely, very patiently, very blankly, he waits.
"Yes. No. Sort of." Delilah goes the whole gamut before picking an answer for Leo. "Sort of, yes." Didn't say it was a good answer! "I wouldn't say Mad Max future. More like…Demolition Man future." …Yeah! Sure. That one. The redhead takes a glance over at Ghost at that, trying to look helpful, if anything.
He finally lets go, swipes a filthy hand over a sweaty forehead and leaves behind a smear of dirt. He's still in junkyard dog mode, but since Ghost is still Teo, somehow. "I talked to Sal today. You broke his heart," he says, bluntly.
Yes. No. Sort of. Ghost experimentally shrugs against the psychic confines of the grasp Leonard's ability has him in, finds about an inch of give before the curvature of his ribs and stoop of his bones meets unforgiving nothing. It's probably just as well. Leonard would probably find it infuriatingly patronizing if he went over and tried to wipe his face clean with a sleeve.
"More than once," he answers. "A long time ago. Who the fuck is Demolition Man?"
Sal? Where does he fit into this? Delilah peers at Leo, puzzled. It doesn't take her long to piece things together, but it still leaves her with a bit of a wary eye for both of them. Ah, whu- she looks up as Ghost asks the question, feeling sheepish. "Er. Uh, Sylvester Stallone. It was a movie. Sandra Bullock was in it too…" Hmm. Not that it matters, so she closes her mouth again.
Ghost is free. Physically, anyway. "I remember," Leonard says, flatly, a little grumpy at feeling he's gotten all wrong-footed, somehow.
"Turn that frown upside-down, Leo," Ghost recommends, perhaps ridiculously, but heartfelt as anything he has the heart to feel, these days. He smiles, cranes his head around the corner of the vehicle to find Delilah's ginger-framed face in rue. "She'll be good for your mood until you're bad for hers.
"Anyway, I wasn't planning on getting in your way. I can stand on the side when you go into reverse." In something like demonstration, he lists over onto his left foot, graduating a slightly exaggerated step out of their way.
Turn that frown upside down! The source of that makes it so absurd. "He's got a point." Don't be such a sourpuss! As if to back that up, Delilah grins at Leo, but just before turning her attention onto Ghost- Very Seriously. "…How long were you skulking around?"
Leonard rolls his eyes, sits down on the back end of the van, Jedi summons not a lightsaber but abottle of water, which he downs in a few swallows. "What do you mean?" he says, pausing to pour some of it over his head and down his shirt.
Having placed himself out of the likeliest exit route the van would take, Ghost begins to scroll forward, an easier grace to his saunter than any he used to take, if nothing resembling the graciously hipped sway of his aunt's gait. Closer, almost experimentally, his eyes gauging sharply from the carefully pleasant neutrality masking his face. What does who mean? "Only a few minutes. It looks close to dead out here. How long have you guys been here?"
Delilah starts a little when the bottle hops by itself out of the shadow and into Leo's hand. Not used to it, quite yet. Not the quick things. She goes from sighing at Leo's grumping to eyeing Ghost as he gets closer. Obviously, his appearance has distracted her enough to not wanting to hurry out of here. Who else is around, anyways? Fff. "Not long. Long enough to get the stragglers." Her hand gestures lightly towards the van full of Stuff, then resting on the frame of the open back. "I was just worried you might have been stalking around watching us." Not that they were doing anything interesting, just that she's trying to look like she is being alert. Totally alert, Yes.
"Not long," says Leo, as if he charged by the word. Still giving Ghost that glare, but not quite capable of summoning more eloquence, clearly.
To be fair, Ghost could— has— stalked most people for hours through any variety and combination of trained skills and cheating. It doesn't say anything poorly about Delilah's vigilance at all if she hadn't noticed. Catching that little parody of neuroticism, though, there's a half a grin for the toadlet before his face changes, a figment of uncertainty which one might as wellllll call courage.
He licks his thumb. Starts it at the dirt-smudged slope of Leonard's face, only to hang a sharp halt at the hackling at the younger man's expression. There's no visible change to his own, though his arm falls back, a concession as tangible as a stumbling retreat, for all that it's executed with a deliberate, almost choreographed grace. He says, "See you guys around."
"Goodbye, Bizarro-Teo." Delilah offers this at his back before motioning a wave to Leo to actually close the doors and get into the van. They're done here.
Leo looks, momentarily, profoundly hurt, watching Ghost go with that expression like he's trembling on the edge of tears. Where is his Teo? What've you done with him? And then he scrambles all the way back into the fan, and shuts the doors.