Participants:
| Scene Title | Peter Pan And The Lost Girl |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Family! Can't get any further without 'em, despite having lived so long without 'em, can't— understand— why— is he—? Why did he—? What—? |
| Date | August 27, 2009 |
Financial District — NYPD Headquarters
The New York Police Department Head Quarters is an old stone building, rennovated many times over the years. The plaster walls are not as cracked and in need of repair as the various Precinct buildings around the city. The fluorescent lights give the room a rather sterile glow. Old posters, civic reminders, duty rosters and newspaper clippings are tacked up on the walls, rustling every time one of the doors opens. A high, wooden desk sits on the north wall, manned by two clerks, who records all visitors and arrests.
The way out to the street lies to the south, while doors to the offices of the Head Quarters lie to the northwest.
Today, Baxter is eating slightly separate from the rest of the flock for no particularly reason other than that nobody he likes is currently using the cafeteria. He is, instead, perched a few feet above his desk, cross-legged in the air, a chicken salad sandwich in his fingers and his big black iPod in hand, watching videos that are a complete breach of professional protocol.
It is, however, one of his particular skills that he manages to put himself at trajectories where supervisors, captains, and so on can't exactly look in over his shoulder. At least thus far, SCOUT has recruited a remarkable shortage of wall-climbers, other flighted, people with— genetically in-built perv cam or whatever. This is convenient for a twenty-five-year-old adolescent, who busts out a guffaw, seemingly at random, while the hands are between twelve twelve and twelve thirteen on the clock, sending a jolt through his meal violent enough to drop a fragment of chicken down, down, down to his keyboard.
It is like lightning when he lunges through the air, if lightning were capable of a corkscrew motion, a curse, earbuds yanked out of his head with one hand and sandwich bread held out in urgency with the other.
Elsewhere in the office, everything else seems to be sorting along at the usual pace; the boys and girls in blue carry on in their day to day activities with the usual amount of fervor, grousing, and general disinterest while the 'bad guys' make their way by the front desk under escort from their guardian officers in a slow but steady stream of petty criminals being brought to justice for such dire crimes as absconding with someone else's scooter or threatening their uppity landlord with a pocket knife. There's a short and slim piece of brunette seated off to the side who wears a somewhat familiar face watching the parade go by all while waiting from something… or someone, maybe.
"Hey. Peter Pan!" The voice that greets Jordan Baxter's ears belongs to a gruff-looking blond man who's swiftly approaching fifty if he's a day. He has a slightly hooked nose and speaks with just the barest inflection of an Irish accent by way of Boston. "Quit fuckin' around. You got a visitor."
The older and less handsome blond obviously has no idea~ what Baxter looks like when he's actually fucking around otherwise he'd realize that Baxter in this decidedly solemn state is far less animate and athletic and things than he is when he's in that one. Objection comes with a scowl, upside-down and suspended with his head a foot above the desk, before he abruptly swivels his boot-heels back down toward Earth.
Not to say that Baxter decides to alight, of course. He stays treading air, thumbing a fragment of poultry into his mouth, as his eyes shift past the space behind the other officer, exaggeratedly, before shifting back. He hikes one golden brow, and the iPod is discreetly thumbed off and pocketed. "You didn't even bring me lunch?" he asks. "What kind of fuckin' relationship is this?"
Officer O'Malley does not have time for your lip, kid. There's a whole pack of cigarettes stashed somewhere in his desk that he needs to scrounge up and begin smoking en masse thanks to another aggravating phone call from his neurotic girlfriend. The older but arguably less handsome blond stalks off only after pitching a thumb in the direction of the front desk, "She's up front." However, he does breathly amend, almost under his breath, "Try not to fuck it up." Whatever that is supposed to mean.
In the air, Baxter turns, frictionless as a candle afloat in water. Baby blues search the crowd, marching past a beefy crimson-cheeked bail-jumper in cuffs and a child squalling in the arms of a fat ethnic mother, before his attention finally squirms through a gap between moving bodies and alights on the tiny sylph of a creature perched on the ugly orange-rind plastic of the row of waiting area chairs. It takes him but a thought, a raptor-like tilt of his head, and then he's descending down from the ceiling a little bit to the girl's stage-right.
"You have that look," he says, in a tenor that has the easy melody of private school in the Upper-East Side. His sandwich wrapper crinkles between his fingers.
Bebe's big brown eyes avert from the passion play of hapless and helpless souls seeking salvation however they may and settle onto the flying man who has recently arrived to her right. She blinks almost audibly in surprise but finds her feet easily enough and without any untoward awkwardness. "Are you… Jordan Baxter?"
"Innn the flesh." The first syllable is drawn out a little, quizzically. He lopes easy over a footless tapestry of air, ends up dropping himself neatly, hindquarters-first, onto the chair beside the one that the girl had just vacated. It's obvious, the instant his flight gives out underneath him, with a bounding rattle, an easy sprawl of ankles. "No notepad says you aren't a reporter. Shirt says this isn't courtship." Cleavage, he means, but as long as he's in someone's trajectory of sight he will deign to oblige profesionalism. Licking his thumb, he pries off another scrap of bread. "Who'd you lose?"
Not enough tits for you, Baxter? Fair enough. If only you'd met a few months ago, eh? More ready flesh than you might have felt comfortable ogling. Especially in light of the revelation about to miraculously manifest.
"You," she offers initially before succumbing to a second guess. "Well, er, what I mean is…" Gosh, okay, how to go about this. Bijou had never really gotten the opportunity to know any of her American cousins. Pictures between parents had been exchange at some point, certainly, and there was something awfully familiar about the man now seated by her side, but, uh, all the same.
"Are you— is your dad's name Duke? Duke Baxter?"
Stalker, stalker~ the klaxons go off in Baxter's head, some remote back corner of it that he examines for a protracted moment before slamming the door on it. He is either dismissing these worrisome signs out of some outrageous sense of ego or his cop-sense of scintillating acuity. She isn't here for that. Either that, or she's such a fine liar that— "You didn't read that in a magazine," he observes, finally, ridging his brow high with curiosity. He sits back in the chair, and takes a philosophic bite out of his sandwich. "My family's very private people. Yeah. That's his name. What's yours?"
The young woman sucks in a sudden breath, perhaps without even realizing it, before she exhales heavily and says, "I'm Baron's daughter… Bijou. I think— we're cousins." Dun dun DUN! Miraculous and amazing! Except for the obvious fact that Bijou Baxter is dead, of course.
Having spilled her guts so suddenly and without even the common sense request of finding some place quiet to speak, Bebe begins to feel a little more swimming than her knees might appreciate. She returns to her seat rather abruptly.
And the parade of PD p… plebians continues before them, feet tocking steadily past them, snatches of conversations leaking into the silent bubble of Jordan Baxter's surprise. This is more absurd than Harrison being away for a week, or the last hair color that Mrs. Knowles chose for her curly crop. Fortunate for all persons involved, however, Baxter is capable of discretion and has exercised it with great agility over the past few weeks. His features remain still for one or two socially awkward moments, before his jaws finally begin to move again, grinding at the mouthful of chicken salad and wheat slices trapped in them.
"You doing anything tommorow night?" he asks, glancing down at the semi-circle he'd just obliterated out of the layered sediment of his tasty eats.
The look that Bebe slings sidelong over to Baxter speaks of a strange albeit temporary sort of suspicion subsumed beneath an initial confusion. That must not have been the sort of response she'd been anticipating. Really? He's just going to take her word for it, then?? No, most likely not, but—
Slowly, the young woman shrugs her thin sweater-clad shoulders and sits up with a bit of better borrowed posture lent by indecision. "I… nothing, I guess." So far as she knows. Unless Brian's taken it upon himself to borrow the boat and ends up crashing it into an inconvenient pier. Or another ship. Or a buoy. Or a school of innocent swimmers.
"Great. There's a gala ball, lots of gladhanding, probably supernaturally boring." As unconcerned as he had been with the girl toppling down into the safety of her seat, Baxter is as whimsical and constituted by nothing~ but~ surface as a leaf on the wind. "Something about General Autumn's new boy band, unleashed on the infested streets of Manhattan, and beyooond." There is slight drama pantomimed here, with a gesture of his sandwich. He casts a shadow toward the ceiling as well as toward the floor, his fair features downturned, still, studying the girl and her furtive clinch.
Which he either fails blithely to notice or pays no mind to! "I have one guest ticket, a partner who's breathing down my fuckin' neck to 'educate myself' to our higher purpose and current events, and no actual date. Yes?" he finishes, brightly.
"You want me to go with you… to a ball?" Clearly, if Bebe possesses any sort of superpower, it doesn't have a damn thing to do with her hearing. She even turns in her seat, tilts her chin awry, and regards him from that subtly adjusted angle as if the flirty flyboy had just sprouted a second head.
Remarkably, however, she similarly fails to exercise any sort of common sense or tactical appreciation for the situation and is soon replying, "Alright." before the ramifications of what it might mean to be photographed on the arm of a SCOUT officer for all the world to see. And the world consisting of John Logan, that is.
"I need to buy a dress," Bebe says to no one in particular before she reaches out a hand as if to suppress the air near her knee from acting up. "Wait. Did you— do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?" And, just in case the answer to that question is 'no', she illuminates him after a beat. "I'm your cousin." Only… not really. But, she doesn't know that.
She doesn't need to! This is a test, in a way. Jordan Baxter has a bad habit of giving people tests, it's a flaw of character, a symptom of what his partner tends to regard as wasted intelligence. Cats may take the fame, but birds have their own conceits, the privilege of high flight pervading various levels of character. He's smiling, though, and that's warm enough, acknowledgment that he doesn't give aloud. "Address is in the paper." He's turning away, already, leaving her with the quandary of Appropriate Wardrobe, flapping a hand in farewell. "I'll meet you at the door, thirty minutes after the article says the thing's gonna start.
"Don't be late, a'ight?"