None Of That Fake Sugar Crap

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leonard_icon.gif teo2_icon.gif

Scene Title None Of That Fake Sugar Crap
Synopsis Girls change their hair to impress; Ghost got his whole face redone. Leonard would probably appreciate this more if he weren't rudely awakened with a violent telekinetic outlash.
Date July 20, 2009

Greenwich Village — Village Renaissance: Alexander's Leonard's Room

Humility befitting a Spartan.


You can either laugh or cry about damn near anything: humor and tragedy are in perception. It's morning. Could be dismal, could be the start of something new. The sky is threatening with rain, densely humid, thick enough to bite through and certainly enough to muffle voices, conductors' whistles, taxi horns and the hissing discharge of subway vapors through the vents.

On the other hand, it's spring-time; this gasp of moisture is going to yank dandelions out of Central Park by the blond of their heads in dozens. Ghost had left the curtain swept a few inches from the frame and a gap in the glass, setting the humid heat of the spring against the powerful influence of the Village Renaissance's air-conditioning system, trying the equilibrium to something comfortable.

He's sitting up at the foot of the bed, socked feet splayed on the mattress. He watches Leonard's head on the pillow, waiting for him to awaken with something akin to patience behind his eyes— the front of his own head now, as of last night, gently restored to its original shape and color and his voice with it. There's a cup of coffee insulated in his hand.

Not, perhaps, the wisest of courses. There's a reason everything in Leo's room is flimsy, his bed an air mattress set on what's little more than a wooden pallet, the walls lined with those eggcrate foam pads generally used to surface beds. Because what greets his drifting up to wakefulness is a diffuse psychic blow - not hard enough to drive the breath from a body, but forceful enough, as Leo ends up half-crouching under the sheet that is his only cover.

Hurts. Not for the first time— possibly, though the specter doesn't have too many ugly little eggs in that ugly little basket— the last. The coffee in his hand jostles. Fortunate that he'd firmly seated a round plastic hat over it; there's no spurt, spill, no stain forthcoming. Merely Teo blinking from over the roof of the beverage, relearning how to breathe and look at Leonard at the same time.

Cough.

"You, sir," he says, proffering the naked Southerner his morning coffee, "have issues."

It wasn't directed at Teo specifically, at least. The little alarm clock has bounced off the wall for the umpteenth time, the battered combat boots been flung after them. Leo is naked and sweating, and not for any pleasant reasons - he favors Teo with the sort of glare a bull gives his first picador. But it fades, and he takes the coffee delicately from Teo. "Tell me something else I don't know," he says, kicking off the sheet and sprawling indelicately over the mattress. No shame at all.

Doffed in extravagant style, the sheaf of linen ends up crashing a white tidal wave over Ghost's leg, knee, wadding up over his toes. He wriggles then once, briefly, or else they curl on reflex, watching his erstwhile lover stretch out on the bed in his state of nudity. He smiles a little. Leans forward, over a creek of springs, lands on his knees first and then his hands, crawling up over the pale scissor of Leonard's legs.

"You haven't said anything about my face," he points out, with a prissy shade of hauteur, a parody of an indignant girlfriend who'd gone through the trouble of changing her hair and getting a new dress.

He sips from the coffee, makes a face, sets it aside. "You look like you should, finally. But which are you?" Leo asks, bluntly. "You got the doc to switch you back, and he didn't feed you your teeth? He's a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

"I sat on his conscience a little," Ghost replies, turning his head to look at the coffee that Leonard had discarded on the table. He doesn't get off his own knees or off of Leonard's, though. "I do that sometimes. Surprising, how often it gets shit done, with the kind of company I keep.

"You didn't have to tell him about us." His left shoulder sharpens into a point, his weight leaned lazily against the planted pillar of one fist. An artificial likeness of laziness, he rests his cheek against it, his chin nudged in on the dense black of his jacket and shirt where they're heaped up in the trench of his own collarbone. Blinks. "Hurt his feelings."

"I shouldn't have," Leo allows. But the lack of remorse is all but total. "It's the truth, though. What you've done to and with him all along is fairly dirty." He stretches back, frankly whorish, as if trying to get a reaction from Teo, down to an elaborate, shoulder-rolling shrug.

Pretty as a picture. Depending onnn what kinds of pictures you prefer to use the Internet for. Ghost smiles, with his eyes first, sharpening without crows' feet, before it bends his mouth around a scimitar's arc. "I spoke a few lies, stole a couple things. As dirt goes, that isn't too filthy. Maybe your imaginations are playing tricks on you two crazy kids."

And flying pigs.

"What's wrong with the fucking coffee?" The last query is muffled against the detail of Leonard's chest; Ghost's nose poked down in the shadow of skin in the groove of his sternum.

Leonard arches under Ghost's mouth, but his lips are pursed, and his expression is a long ways from seductive. HE just looks thuggish, even were he attempting bedroom eyes. "You used that fake sugar crap," he accuses.

"You're a cop turned penniless terrorist," Ghost points out, wrinkling the long axis of his magically refurbished nose. He laves another kiss down on Leonard's chest, before picking his head up, bending, eyes blinking up the incline of clavicles, and where the blurred IED scar forks before losing momentum up the thug's shoulder. "You don't care. You're just being a bitch."

Sweet-tempered darlings, aren't they? Little wonder there's a lamb-like doctor out there, heart-wrecked, coming to grips with the hard and dirty conclusion that Jesse Knight and his own, once-named white knight deserve each other. Ghost folds his hands closed on Leonard's forearms, his thumbs trapping the parenthetical curve of the large vein on the inner crook of either elbow, trapping Leonard's arms, trapping his hands, too, by default, despite the apparent annoyance that the ex-soldier's ingratitude had elicted.

He neither says nor does anything for a moment. Studying his naked boy. Then, roughly: "I don't think you should go to Pinehearst."

Leonard arches under Ghost's mouth, but his lips are pursed, and his expression is a long ways from seductive. HE just looks thuggish, even were he attempting bedroom eyes. "You used that fake sugar crap," he accuses.

"You're a cop turned penniless terrorist," Ghost points out, wrinkling the long axis of his magically refurbished nose. He laves another kiss down on Leonard's chest, before picking his head up, bending, eyes blinking up the incline of clavicles, and where the blurred IED scar forks before losing momentum up the thug's shoulder. "You don't care. You're just being a bitch."

Sweet-tempered darlings, aren't they? Little wonder there's a lamb-like doctor out there, heart-wrecked, coming to grips with the hard and dirty conclusion that Jesse Knight and his own, once-named white knight deserve each other. Ghost folds his hands closed on Leonard's forearms, his thumbs trapping the parenthetical curve of the large vein on the inner crook of either elbow, trapping Leonard's arms, trapping his hands, too, by default, despite the apparent annoyance that the ex-soldier's ingratitude had elicted.

He neither says nor does anything for a moment. Studying his naked boy. Then, roughly: "I don't think you should go to Pinehearst."

"You make it sound like that's something new," Leo points out, very drily. "Try again, kiddo. And why shouldn't I go to Pinehearst? They need me to fight, knock heads on you know who's minions, why wouldn't I do that?" He doesn't sound all that defensive, not yet. Nor does he try to buffalo Teo off him. Just eyes him with that imperious expression.

Reciprocal annoyance bends Teo's brow, makes him heavy as he levers himself down onto Leonard as a walrus on the shore, all stumped limbs and belligerently toothy snout shoved up into the thug's face. He scowls, suddenly so much the five-year-old. "I didn't come all the way back here so you could throw down with the man who fucking killed you in 2011," he says.

Growls, really. The picture of discontent, even as he puts a fist up under his jaw to rest on, like an obstinate schoolchild at his detention desk. "Mind you," he allows, a quizzical lift of stark brows, "I know you're going to fucking go anyway. I'm just saying: I don't think you should."

"Duly noted," Leo says, with a certain suicidal blitheness. And then Teo finds himself levitated, like a magician's lovely assistant. Still prone in the same position, merely about eight inches higher overall than he was a moment previously. This is so Leo can sit up and begin the leisurely process of undressing Teodoro, by actual hand, even.

By hand. Must be a Hell of an occasion, if he isn't being summarily wrenched out of his clothes with an unconcerned flick of a patentedly lazy wrist. Ghost remains disgruntled, floating in the air like a tethered balloon. "You aren't taking me seriously," he observes, but he straightens his left arm, anyway, allowing Leonard to extricate it from sleeve.

The telekine's hands roam, lazily possessive, as if Teodoro really were nothing more than his animate blow-up doll, stripping him with the efficiency of an undertaker. "Not ….not entirely, no. I have to go. I'll prep to the best of my ability, but I can't sit this one out," he says, simply. "I'll be fine, Teodoro. Now, which Teo are you, actually? The future or the past?"

"Future. The dead one," Ghost clarifies tactlessly, making a face when the tag of his shirt scratches with crispy vehemence down the column of his spine. His shoulder slices out into view, belly. Tattoos, all of them in their right place; the cross on his bicep amid the white water and incipient boatwreck, Never Knows Best scripted in an unfurling scroll across its horizontal axel, the iconographed knight printed over his heart.

Only the taloned 'S' at the base of his neck bears differentiates this Teo from the one that Leonard belongs to. Is supposed to belong to. "I'd be bitching a lot more about this turn events if I wasn't. You know that, right?" Acerbic jealousy, however misappropriated, taints the question. His eyes snap pale at Leonard's face, inert, steely, belying the outbreak of needling gooseflesh under the grasp of the telekinetic's hands.

"And the original. He's in there, right? What does he say about this?" Leo wonders, pausing trace the outline of the knight with a fingertip, lips pursed lazily. He moves on, to unbuckle Teo's belt, flick it aside with lazy contempt.

Strip leather flickers a shadow down the wall, whiplash swift, and the buckle whacks a table-top with enough force to have shattered it skull, if it were the actual serpent that characterizes it so well as a metaphor. Ghost glances after it, and frowns at that, too. Those are his things!

There's a spasmodic gesture of fingers in the air, an expectant— and somewhat petulant— beckoning: he would like to come down now. Waiter. Waiter? "What he says and what he feels don't tend to be similar, wherever you're concerned," he points out, comfortable in this absurdity of grammatical third person. "Or else they are, and he changes his mind every ten minutes to a fortnight. He's angry with you, but he pities me. They balance each other out whenever they aren't tearing him in half.

"Mostly, he just tells me I'm an asshole." There's a brief downward glance of genuine, if distracted curiosity. Oh, look. He's in boxer briefs today. The buttons are gray. Ghost hadn't really noticed earlier in the morning: too busy adoring himself in the mirror to be fucked about what he was covering himself up with.

And down he comes, feather gentle, to land on the canvas surface of the cot. Leo doesn't relent, however. The telekinetic hold is replaced by a purely physical one, as he half-rolls onto Teo, puts his mouth by the Sicilian's ear. "Tell him to lie back and enjoy what I'm about to do, really, it's for both versions of you. I'll make it good."

"Uh huh. Genius. Are you going to suck Sylar off, too?" No one ever accused the ghost of grace, in any sense of the virtue, not particularly merciful, courteous, or even perfunctorily sweet.

His currency is uncomfortable truths, and the dirty joke that this is going to make Teo feel any better about this whole situation is best mapped out against the fact that there is an only partially-reformed serial killer as frequently privvy to these revelatory… fuckings. "This situation is a prime example of why we're constantly at each others' throats when we aren't guarding each others' backs.

"And yes," to the unanswered question, though quieter, now, the joke diminishing with volume, screwed down in the same motion that circles his gaze sidelong at the man perched halfway over him. Lust lazes in his eyes, grief drowsing against its flank and adoration flexing its claws. "I'm still talking just to annoy you."

Leonard goes still. "What?" he says, quietly. "What do you mean?" That statement has certainly dimmed Leo's ardor, and he's far more a dead weight than he was. Head cocked, like he's listening for someone else.

Nothing. Everything. Nothing that matters: the ghost is still available for pity, Leonard— Jesse— whatever— still reprehensible on some levels, but coveted for all of those and others. Ghost is silent. Everything—

"Nothing," he says, lifting his head. His scalp is shaven down to coarse velvet, rasps linens gently as he bends his nose into Leonard's cheek, trying the younger man's chin with a kiss that matches the curve as gently as a candywrapper. "There's no one in here but you and me." The strength drops out of his neck, goes lazy, off-axis; he glances up the incline of his own cheek, at Leonard. "I'm just being difficult."

"As usual," Leo says, ungraciously, and then shifts himself up Teo's back. Well, guess who'll be on top this time?

Between bumping jostles of objection, muffled laughter, and the eventual forfeit, first sullen then sweetened, the coffee gets cold.


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