Participants:
And NPC'd by Felix:
| Scene Title | None Escape |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Deckard tries to call Felix to tell him this totally hilarious story about how he's actually not an arsoning murderering insane person, but Ivanov is too busy being dead to talk. Agent Moreau takes the call instead. |
| Date | December 4, 2008 |
DECKARD'S SAFE PLACE
I think they all knew and dreaded what was coming. I looked round at their strange faces. When I saw their wincing attitudes and the furtive dread in their bright eyes, I wondered that I had ever believed them to be men.
Bottle of whiskey, open. Glass, half empty. Scruffy guy, drunk. Deckard is seated on the side of his bed, off-white dress shirt open over the marginally less off-white of his undershirt. Collar and cuffs flared open, he's ditched his shoes, but (fortunately for anyone who should enter without knocking) not his pants. The whiskey, mostly residue now in glass and bottle alike, is at his feet, besieged by rings of condensation that've soaked dark into the wood flooring.
Knees wide apart, his left hand is busy serving as a platform to support his head. The right is full of cellular phone. New phone. Unfamiliar phone. Potentially risky, bugged, untrustworthy terrorist hone.
He dials.
It rings much longer than Fel ever let it. Felix was one of those jerks who nearly had the damn thing grafted to his hip (there's an image, thank you, Mr. Cronenberg). But it doesn't go to voice mail. An unfamiliar female voice answers. "Hello. Who is this?" The tone is crisp, businesslike.
Not one to count rings, there's something about the time it takes that roughs the wrong way down Deckard's preconception of how this call is supposed to go. The hand supporting his face reaches around to scratch nervously at the back of his head. He looks to the door, long face slack in its paranoid study of the absence of anyone eavesdropping on the other side of it, and then through the outer wall, where no SUVs full of angry people are in the process of pulling up onto the lawn. Nothing at all, and he's still managed to break out in a cold sweat before there's an answer. Not the one he was expecting.
There's a short silence while Deckard puzzles back at the closed door, then: "…Who's this?"
"This is Agent Moreau." She even introduces herself that way. Apparently there are no actual humans in the New York office, just suit-wearing automatons. "This is Ivanov's phone. Were you trying to reach him?"
More silence. Brow furrowed, Deckard tries to assimilate this as best he can, and fails. Too much booze, not enough patience. "Ah…yeah. Are you some kind of secretary? I need to talk to him. It's important."
There's a frosty silence at that, for oh so many reasons. It only lasts a heartbeat or two, though. "I am not his secretary," she says, quietly. "Forgive my bluntness, but anything you needed to say to him, you can to me. I've been given his cases, for the most part. You see, he's dead."
Oblivious to frosty silences, Deckard takes the offensive opportunity to hold the phone away from his face so that he can squint at the number he dialed. It seems to be the right one, so with nose wrinkled, he presses it back to his ear when Moreau starts talking again. Whiskey glass on its way up from the floor so that he can drain out what's left, the effort is ground to a halt with that last important piece of information.
He stares at the far wall. The glass drips.
"Are you there?" Her voice contains polite concern, and the edge of some tension. "Are you in need of help?"
The glass is set down on the desk, almost out of reach. Silence threatens to keep stretching on his end of the line, until Deckard finally swallows and remembers to say something. "No…it's. No. I just peed myself a little, is all. …Okay." His breath shakes enough for his voice to waver on the okay, and he pulls the phone away to thumb over the end call button.
Phone and all, both hands cage over his head for a second. Two. Ten, thirty. Sixty. He sits with his elbows bent over his knees, watching his grey socks turn greyer.
Eventually audible from downstairs is the crack of his nice, new, terrible, treacherous phone against the far wall, followed by the creak and shriek of ancient bed springs. After that, silence and stillness. He doesn't move again until morning.
 December 3rd: Bad Words |
 December 4th: Lying Liars Who Lie |