Participants:
Scene Title | Northern Lights |
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Synopsis | Portents of doom and flirting. |
Date | September 27, 2019 |
Rooftop, Raytech
The little girl whose name reflects what's happening in the night sky is downstairs sleeping, but the child's mother can't. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" she asks him as he approaches where she's sitting on a blanket up here on Raytech's roof watching nature's light show. The predicted aurora borealis caused by the geomagnetic storm made her … a little itchy. When the blue eyes turn toward him, Elisabeth smiles faintly. "It's ridiculous that we can't watch something so amazing without wondering if it's a harbinger of yet another portal of doom." Their lives are so nuts.
A chin jerks toward the bottle he's got with him. "Is that Dad's good stuff?" Because well… it's funny as hell when Jared mumbles about his whiskey going missing.
“Of course it’s your father’s good stuff,” Richard replies, leaning a bit against the ledge of one of the garden walls here on the roof - the autumn weather having stolen the color from the flowers, but the greenery thrives on throughout the year and season all the same. The bottle’s tilted her way, and he flashes a grin, “It’s fun watching him grumble about it.”
Then his gaze lifts to the heavens, and he admits, “I can’t help but think about it. I’ve made sure that the quantum station is monitoring three times now, but so far they haven’t reported anything unusual… I have to wonder if we haven’t done something weird to the atmosphere with all our fucking around.”
It makes her laugh. "Love… I'm pretty sure the world is screwed up enough all by itself and has nothing to do with how much we fuck around." Elisabeth pauses and then shoots him a cheeky smirk. "Oh… you meant the other kind of fucking around." She holds out a hand in silent command to share the whiskey. Gimme that, ya stinker. "As long as they keep monitoring, I'm … not going to panic. There's no spirals. Nothing that looks like exactly what I've seen before." A glance shoots skyward and her tone is quiet. "I didn't tell her that this was happening, though." Their daughter. "I wanted her asleep before there was any chance she'd see it."
“It was a good call,” says Richard soberly, leaning over a bent knee and reaching out to pass the bottle to his… wife, which is still something that makes him smile every time he thinks of the fact that they’re wearing rings these days. “Mom doesn’t seem concerned, and if she isn’t worried I’m pretty sure it means this is fairly safe. I’d still like to get some atmospheric monitoring up and going… my kingdom for access to the old HAARP systems.”
"Pffffft," Elisabeth snorts, taking the bottle and leaning back on one hand to sip from it. After a swallow, she holds it back out and comments, "Have all the storms and electromagnetic whosiwhatsis knocked all the old satellites out of the sky? I mean… how come Alia or some other technopath hasn't already taken over that bullshit?" she wonders idly. It's not really a serious question — she's assuming that since Richard doesn't have control of the damn things that they no longer are functional! (Amazing how much faith she has in him to steal shit like that, hm?) "But you're not allowed to give up the kingdom," she objects lazily. "Cuz then you'd just go build another one and I don't wanna have to work that hard."
“No, most of them are still up there,” Richard admits, leaning back and tilting his head to look up at the lazily shifting colours dimly visible in the darkened skies, one hand raising to point towards those heavens, “Still working away, making sure we have satellite weather reports and… all of that. We’d need to put something new up there…”
A glance over, a twitch of a smile, “They have limits, remember? We had to deal with that, back with the Company’s satellite…”
"Riiiiiight," Elisabeth agrees. Because of course they do. She isn't really watching the colors — they're beautiful and yet they do make her a little uneasy just from experience. She's watching him as he watches the colors, watching his expressions shift as thoughts pass through his head. "You know… in all the time I was gone, I don't think sitting here under the Northern Lights with you was ever one of my daydreams," she suddenly chuckles. Of all the places she might think about him, this one wasn't exactly on the radar. "I used to sit in the park or take Aurora to the Main Library — and I'd always laugh to myself. Couldn't help it. Kept thinking of a garden on the roof, the one you showed me pictures of once. Couldn't get up there to look at the spot, though. Just wondered, you know, before I knew things had gone so bad to hell here, whether you still kept them up. Assuming you were alive."
“A funny story about that…” Richard’s chin drops down again and he turns his full gaze upon her, reaching out a hand to curl about hers in a slide of fingers around her palm, “So, back during the bad winter — remember, the one Julie made? I found Tamara up on the roof trying to take care of the trees I was growing up there. She was freezing the shit out of her fingers, though. We brought them all inside, set up a little greenhouse room. But…”
A low chuckle, “After the war started, the government rolled in there and cleared the place out. So you’ll never guess what I did.”
Twining her fingers into his, she uses the other hand to take another sip from the bottle and then offer it back to him while he's talking. She can't remember if he told her about that… he might have? Elisabeth's smile is warm, though, and she comments, "That sounds like Tamara. She turns up in the oddest of places sometimes…" Babying his trees, turning up out of nowhere to hand a flower to David Cardinal, being on hand to save Liz's and everyone else's asses when they landed in Bright. Always in the right place at the right time. "What did you do?"
The bottle’s taken as she passes it over, and Richard pauses to take a swig of it; eyes closing as it burns down his throat, exhaling a chuckle once it’s gone. “I snuck back into the city to steal them,” he admits, thumb sliding over the back of her hand, “No power, my Horizon was long gone… just me.”
Elisabeth just shakes her head, entirely not surprised. "I'm pretty sure I married a madman," she teases lightly, leaning her head sideways to rest it on his shoulder. The brilliant light show is pretty amazing. "Of course, I'm pretty sure it was a given that if I ever married anyone he'd have to be some crazy guy willing to put up with my shit, so… that's not really saying much." She wrinkles her nose playfully at him. "I mean, have you met my parents? The fact that you were insane enough to actually let my father stick around and didn't whap him on the head with a bat somewhere in those years speaks volumes." Cue the exaggerated eyeroll because… yeah, right. "Or.. maybe you're the lucky one. I still have no idea how you two and Raquelle co-existed in a tiny little bunker together." The imagery is mind-boggling.
“It was fine,” Richard laughs, head turning to brush his cheek against her hair, “Tamara was waiting for me. We had a fun little chase out of town with a truck full of trees, though, all the way to the docks to steal a boat…”
A low chuckle tumbles past his lips, then, and he gestures with the bottle, “We had some tents and such outside, there were too many people to stay indoors the whole time. Raquelle was great. Always keeps me from getting a big head.”
A bit sly, he notes, “Unlike you. You tend to do the opposite.”
She's giggling uncontrollably by the time he gets to the boat. "Okayokay, I now have this whole chase scene running through my head with you and Tamara driving and changing the friggin' look of it like Johnny Dangerously." Elisabeth's laughter is relaxed and she seems to find the idea a bit hilarious. "Shelf paper with duckies too?" She wouldn't put it past Tamara.
And then he's gettin' a little innuendo going on there, and she grins cheekily. "Well, you know me… I do love having such control over men that their heads swell," she teases. "Of course, I might be getting rusty. I'm told that laughter sometimes destroys the effect." She casts a brief glance down at him, before looking back up and batting her lashes. "Does it?"
“I wouldn’t say so,” Richard replies with a grin down to her, bringing the bottle’s open mouth to her lips in a gesture of offering as both eyebrows go up, “If you can’t have a little fun with it all, what’s the point?”
His fingers brush over her opposite shoulder, “And that’s pretty accurate. The chase, anyway.”
Just the thought makes her chuckle again, and she watches his face as she steadies the bottle to take another sip. Her father has damn good taste in scotch, that's for certain. The warm glow in her stomach is nice in the chill of the evening. Tamara, Richard, a truck full of trees, and shelf paper… Gawd.
"Sounds like a pretty fucking fun evening," Elisabeth admits after she swallows the mouthful. Her hand rises from the bottle to slip off his glasses. There's little to no light pollution anymore, so the sky's crazy colors are really the only illumination. And it's only really just recently occurred to her. "The first time I saw you again… you weren't wearing these." They reappeared pretty much immediately on her arrival. She studies his eyes without them. "I don't know why I just remembered that, but…" Strange, the things that pop up out of nowhere. "I'd forgotten, just a little, how handsome you are." At the risk of swelling his head still further.
It takes a moment for Richard’s eyes to adjust, his nose wrinkling a little. “Yeah. I didn’t have my ability at the time, so…” He refocuses on her face, illuminated by those faint colors in the sky, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips, “Oh, now you are trying to give me an ego, beautiful.”
Those eyes are dark, of course; the pupils swollen to nearly devour the iris, leaving it just the faintest ring of color, not that the color can be seen in the twilight. But there’s tender warmth in them as he looks upon her in this moment, hand brushing up her far shoulder to graze a thumb to her neck.
That's information she didn't know — it's evident in the brief moment of shock that passes over her features. "You didn— whoa." She pauses, assimilating that, a faint frown pulling her brows together. "For a long time?" Searching his face, though, her frown eases again — his power is a part of him that she takes for granted and it's only a small part of the man anyway. She offers a half-smile. "Eh… I like you with an ego, lover." Her shoulder rises slightly to bring the curve of her neck a little tighter to the touch of his hand, and Elisabeth meets the dark eyes. She's not afraid he's simply going to vanish these days, at least. But he still occasionally intercepts a rather intent stare while he's puttering with something, as if she's marveling that this is her reality. "It never gets old, watching you," she confesses.
A flicker of surprise. “Nobody told you? Yes, ah…” Richard’s smile fades a little, “Ezekiel took it, remember? Just before the floor gave way. Things were a little chaotic at the time, so I’m not surprised if you didn’t notice.”
He leans down, then, nose brushing hers and brow resting on her own as he murmurs, “Same.” A beat passes. “Especially in the shower.”
Shaking her head slowly, Elisabeth admits, "I don't … " When the scaffold went down with him under it… he can tell the moment she remembers. "I didn't remember. I guess… I just thought you got it back after I left." She never knew he lost it altogether.
Tipping her head up to nuzzle his face softly and rest with his head to hers, she breathes out a quiet sigh, a sound of contentment. Slipping her hand up to cradle his jaw, her eyes catch the band on her finger. It represents such a wide range of things between them. But her attention is drawn back to their banter. "I love it when you talk dirty to me," she chuckles warmly.
“What, you call that talking dirty?” A grin, then, flashes to Richard’s lips as he leans into the touch of her hand, “I have yet begun to talk dirty. You know how you can tell?”
He turns his head enough to kiss to the side of her hand, “You’re still dressed.”
"I know," she sighs mournfully. "There was a time where you and me on a rooftop made for really hot sex. Married life is starting to worry me." Elisabeth grins at him wickedly.
“It was our first date,” Richard observes with a sly smile, then, reaching over to carefully reclaim the bottle of expensive whiskey from her hand and then leaning away, reaching back to set the bottle carefully down on the edge of the low wall around the garden section beside them. Then he turns back to her and raises a single eyebrow before challenging, “Bet I could get naked before you do.”