Participants:
| Scene Title | Parting Uglies |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | They always make up a night or five before the end of the world. |
| Date | November 17, 2009 |
Chelsea — A Bar With Food On The Menu
Italian for dinner, a crappy token salute back at home but what you get for nine dollars in New York City off a bar menu. That isn't the point of eating at a bar anyway. Drinking is the point of eating at a bar, and Teo commits to this agenda with gusto. Four bears and a few shots in some mixed up program, no acknowledgment or interest in proofs, hops, no logical order other than the whimsical visions and revisions of his mood. It's too dark in here, which is characteristic of the city's bars, and of the evenings he generally kills with his best friend.
The darkness is flattering, insofar as that it conceals the bruises that cloud his jaw and the old man's hitch to the shoulder DHS put a bullet in the other night. Munin's down a well, Danko's been dragged off to some other dark hole, but it's not like anyone up here is sunning themselves in the light. He'd already said: he doesn't regret turning on the pastor, not really. Isn't ashamed of it; the secret isn't being kept for his sake. Weather's getting colder, Joe hates him, there's a temporally-displaced Frenchman living on Abby's good graces. That's it for current events, except for—
"—and we're going to Russia because of the nuke thing," squinting saturnine at the barman despite that he's well out of earshot. "So. How was your week?"
"Why didn't you just shoot him?" Alex enquires, very calmly. He's only had a beer himself, and that he's nursed like it's some rare and precious elixir. The food….well, not so much the particular palate, with him, so he's eaten his penne pasta with enthusiasm, along with some soup. "And quiet," he adds, softly. "I'm gonna leave town for a while soon, I think."
Surprise registers in the lift of Teo's brow, his jaw dropping to say something but conviction deserts him. That sounds like a good idea, of course, as awakening from a nightmare or dousing yourself when on fire sounds like a good idea, but unexpected to hear from anyone who's made a lifelong commitment to joining categorically unwise and violently self-destructive crusades until discharged. Teodoro can't honestly picture Helena letting Al go. Not unless asked, and maybe even then. "Couldn't aim after my shoulder got fucked up. Wh—" He props his cheek on his fist. "Where are you going?"
The dark eyes are opaque, fixed on some vague middle distance. "Nowhere in particular," he says, finally, after a pull on his beer. "I'll head west. That's about as much as I've thought out, so far."
"Okay," Teo says, in a tone of voice that indicates unmistakably that the news is likely to leave certain persons anything but. It takes him a few minutes before he stops trying to read through Leonard's deliberate refusal to show anything. "There are Ferry outposts in places, help the immigrants settle into their new identities. Kingston, Costa Verde. I remember one of Phoenix's old boys came from Boston. That's—" He grates into an awkward silence, fingers closed on the clouded condensation of his pint glass.
Leonard blinks at Teo, patiently. "This isn't for work. This is….a vacation," He says it like it's a foreign word. "To get my head on straight. I don't know how long I'll be gone." What kind of time is that, heading out into the teeth of winter?
Sssounds like a bad time to Teo. His fingers ripple on the bar-top, a polite waiting room fidget. His lip curls briefly, relaxes again. He has the distinct conviction that if Leonard is really going to stay away until his head is on straight, New York City is never going to see him again.
Which is lucky for either him or New York City, depending on who you ask. He turns his eye, panning past a drunkard stumbling toward the exit. "I guess I can't blame you. It was my birthday yesterday, you know? I nearly got to shoot Emile Danko in the head for my birthday, and that was going to be a good fucking birthday. They probably have cake and candles in the West."
Leonard blinks at Teo, patiently. "This isn't for work. This is….a vacation," He says it like it's a foreign word. "To get my head on straight. I don't know how long I'll be gone." What kind of time is that, heading out into the teeth of winter?
Sssounds like a bad time to Teo. His fingers ripple on the bar-top, a polite waiting room fidget. His lip curls briefly, relaxes again. He has the distinct conviction that if Leonard is really going to stay away until his head is on straight, New York City is never going to see him again.
Which is lucky for either him or New York City, depending on who you ask. He turns his eye, panning past a drunkard stumbling toward the exit. "I guess I can't blame you. It was my birthday yesterday, you know? I nearly got to shoot Emile Danko in the head for my birthday, and that was going to be a good fucking birthday. They probably have cake and candles in the West."
He blushes. Still as vivid as ever. "You just had your birthday. And I didn't get you anything," Leo says, aghast. "I'm sorry. And yeah, that woulda been. Now HomeSec has him?"
Scratching his fingers through his hair, Teo's eyes fall disfocused on the wall behind the bar. Streaky glass shows him crimson Leonard and his own reflection, mottled and distorted, but the bruises concealed by that same token.
He remains uncomfortably aware he's wearing them, though; it pinches at his vanity though the buzz ('buzz') blocks the physical sensation, and the occasion makes it worse. Partially because Teodoro doesn't actually knnnnow if HomeSec has him yet, and partially because he had been one of those who had punched Teodoro in the head. "I missed your birthday too," he observes, diplomatically, turning his pintglass in his hand. "Want to have sex?"
Uh…..huh. What? Leo's face is a study in perplexity. "That's okay. I don't really celebr- what? Don't feel you have to make it up for missing my birthday," he says, reddening yet further. He seems puzzled, more than intrigued.
More beer, sliding dewy into his mouth high in the air until there's nothing left clinging to the vessel. Really, at the rate Teo's drinking, it was a miracle he wasn't flabby and out of the game by 2019. "Why not?" he asks, pushing the cup away with a switchblade flick of fingers.
"I know you don't remember, but the last time we tried, it didn't go so well," Leo says, simply.
There's a momentary silence, a troubled knit to Teo's brow. "What happened?" he asks, trying to picture it in his head. He stops just short of clapping a hand over his groin— enough beer in his belly always starts him on a backslide to being the lewdly insoucient sixteen-year-old hooligan whose rich film star aunt was the only real preventative for a rap sheet as long as the island he called home~ "Was it— that I couldn't—"
"No, you weren't impotent," Leo says, looking away to the ranked bottles behind the bar. "That wasn't the issue, then. I just didn't enjoy it, and really, nor did you."
The picture grows markedly worse as the description goes on. Teo considers it in silence for a long moment, before summarily ripping it in two with a looped hand gesture. "I'm different now. You're different, too. Together, we're more or less resigned to a brief and violent lifetime of elaborate resignation to… whatever this epic, lyric-worthy tragic hang-up is, and mutually—" He squints, rubs a cautious knuckle across his broken lip. "Determined the other shouldn't have to suffer more than's strictly necessary for it."
That's kind of like a good reason to have sex.
Leo turns away from the bottles to blink at Teo. "I….don't think I understood what you just said," he admits, blinking guilelessly. "And I still don't think it's a good idea. I know you have your reasons for what you do, but…."
"But what?" Teodoro is in turn confused, but slightly less at the clunky traincar tumble of heavy thoughts than because he failed to follow an otherwise simple sentence into the next. Pre-apocalyptic sex isn't 'what he does,' as far as he's aware. Granted, he doesn't really remember fucking Felix Ivanov, or ergo abandoning Salvatore Bianco, and has only the vaguest grasp on the atmosphere and context of the night he'd sat with Abigail before the Invierno—
"I don't like being used," the telekine says, finally finishing that beer. "Even by you. Right now….I love you, but we're friends, we're not lovers." Despite his denial, though, his body language is entirely contradictory. He sets down his bottle, and nods at the door. "Let's go."
Blah blah blah. Mostly to quell the increasingly ugly self-portrait that's forming in his head, Teo rolls his eyes like he's six years old and being denied a toffee on the grounds that his teeth can't take it, because he has all his teeth, orthodontically perfect, as this was before the Samoan bouncer who'd caved his head in broke his incisor too. Still, he gets up, finds himself at precisely ('precisely') that point of inebriation he used to strive to get himself to prior to a riot. Coordination roughly intact, but granted the fuzzy-edged illusion that he is ten feet tall and bulletproof.
The wind doesn't even aggravate him, with its icicled prickle toying by when he pools out onto the sidewalk, jacket still open, squinting at the lights. Tipping sideways at the waist, he hurdles an arm over Leonard's shoulders, tugs with wolfish insistence at his packmate's nape. "It must have been really bad if you don't even want to have a go one of the last days we might ever see each other," he observes, a cloudy voice in Leonard's ear.
"We'll have one," Leo's tone lacks the old lustful anticipation, though, and his face is rather impassive. "And it was. Which is why you're going to be on the bottom, this time, at least at first. And then you'll be off to Moscow, and I'll be out west. You fuck that Russian again, while you're there, I'll kill the both of you."
dslgskasfsfffffoh. Teo's jaw unhinges. Closes again. The vehemence, however understated, catches him off-guard. The last starburst of static goes off in his head, leaving him to musical chairs what memories that remain around in vague hope of committing certainty to suspicion.
"I wasn't planning on fucking any Russians," he answers very clearly. "But you seem to have a specific one in mind." His head goes over his far shoulder, cranking a few inches of extra distance between his face and his friend's brutally enforced indifference, as if that might help him focus, and focus provide some of the missing information.
Leo shoots him a sharp look. "Good. And you don't remember Ivanov, do you?" he says, quietly. "Where to now? My place or yours?"
Screwing Ivanov seems like such a preposterously bad decision that it is almost believable. Teo's eyes close and open twice. He doesn't remember that part. Of. Ivanov, would be the appropriate phrase.
He chooses not to ask for elaboration, retroactively catching up on other things that were said. "I don't have a place. There?" A long forefinger straightens parallel to Leonard's chin, pointed at a Motel sign glowing phosphorescent beside a darked out guitar store. His shoulder twinges, and he chivalrously ignores it. "We'll do whatever you want."
The telekine eyes the motel thoughtfully. Glances back at Teo, and notes, oh so casually, "I've got a condom in my pocket. I'm thinking we should pick up more, though." …..he was a boy scout. They're always prepared, right?
For a night of presumably anal sex with maladjusted foreigners? Hopefully not what Boyce had in mind when he created the Boy Scouts of America movement, though that could arguably explain some of Leonard's damage, wherever Iraq leaves off. Teo gives him a long squint, before a smile suddenly pulls up the corners of his mouth. There's a gust of laughter, limes and hops. Occasionally, it's nice to be pre-empted, though he can't entirely wrap his lobes around Leonard making the first move anymore. "I'll get the room, you get the rubbers, or is some form of joint supervision required for these tasks?"
"That works," Leo says, sagely, and smiles, oh so sly. "Drugstore on the corner. Lemme get us a couple of boxes. And some water." There's heat in his face - banked, subdued, but there. Not as disinterested as he's been pretending….or trying to be.
Teo swivels his head to study the long stretch of striped asphalt between where they are standing and the motel that he is supposed to be trying to make a booking at, assuming that the Department of Homeland Security doesn't swoop down like a murder of ravens before he gets there. Now like he was then, he automatically shies faintly from the look on Leonard's face, but only faintly, and he rebukes himself silently and unceremoniously before the reaction manifests in more than a beatifically blond blink.
"Dammi il bacio," he commands instead, trading English away in exchange for an unmistakable gesture, his forehead bumped into Leonard's temple in defiance! to the few pedestrians still dawdling along outside the dingy bar strip, his cheek pressing its bruised heat against the incline of the other man's face,
Oh, yes. It's tender, despite that dark look. Like Teo is something fragile, a spun glass confection instead of his rough and tumble boy. He turns his head, puts his lips to the corner of Teo's shyly, even as he lays a hand between Teo's shoulder blades. Still waiting for this to prove to be an illusion, a waking dream, for the Sicilian to vanish in a whorl of heated smoke.
A common expectation when it comes to smooching Teodoro Laudani, but he never has imploded and disappeared on anyone before; least of all in Alexander's waking dreams. Psionically-induced interrogative nightmare. Thing. No, he remains tangible, solid and as intact as he had been the previous minute, his breath the only irregularity fired across Leo's cheek, as tall as he remembers and broad across the shoulders. Some smashed stranger hisses mucusy disgust in lieu of having the coordination to actually hock a loogie as he slouches across the curb, but the Sicilian, at least, ignores him.
The disgust of the ignorant ignored, Leo's kiss is a question. As if this might be how he can see if Teo's really in earnest. He fits himself more closely to the blonde, turning that placed hand into half an embrace. He's warm, his mouth tastes of the sweet beer he was drinking.
Never let it be said that Teodoro Laudani won't put his money where his mouth is, or his mouth where he said he'd put it, or so it goes. The answer, with or without the small font explanation and caption describing the complicated circumstances of impending nuclear doom in Russia or pilgramage out to some edenic Tolkienesque West and how arbitrary it is that sex between is always Good-bye and not Hello, the night before instead of the morning after, is a unanimous Yes.
Despite that the cartlidge of his nose has seen better days, it winds up bent in earnest in Leo's cheek, and the comradely arm slung around his shoulders turned into a koala-mitted grasp on his collar. Teo kisses Leonard soundly, too discomfitted by nerves to give in to your regularly-scheduled drunken sloppiness, and then pulls his head back. Smiles.