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Scene Title | Privacy |
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Synopsis | Bennet invades it, Deckard wants it, Alia disturbs it |
Date | October 13, 2010 |
Xichang China
The occasional noise of passing cars isn't quite enough to rouse Flint Deckard from aching sleep, the aforementioned aching however is.
Somewhere between I'm shot and go fuck yourself he'd lost consciousness. It was daylight out, then, and now with windows of the vacant room he's been dragged into showing a night sky and a faint suggestion of stars, there's an obvious progression of time that he was not presently awake for. Being shirtless is also new, and that his gunshot wound is bandaged and a first aid kit is laid on the floor nearby along with a bloody pair of tweezers, antiseptic and a plastic tupperware with a bullet in it implies it may have been more than just a few hours, too.
He's not alone in the room, however. Slouched in a corner, sitting up straight with her head against one wall, Catherine Chesterfield has fallen asleep sitting up. Maybe they've been taking turns watching Deckard, maybe she's the only one who cared. Eyes shut and mouth partly open, her sleep is silent, a curl of dark hair hanging down one side of her face from where it has wrested away from being tied up behind her head.
The sleeping bag Flint was laid out on is stiff, only the floor beneath it, but the night air is warm enough that laying uncovered as he was hasn't been that much of a detriment. It's warmer wherever he is than it is in New York City at night, or Massachusetts; the last few days are kind of a tangles mess.
The building is an unfamiliar one, but stinks of disuse and mildew. The Spartan design seems utilitarian, with a door frame not containing a door, tall and narrow windows too high to see out of, white plaster walls painted gray halfway up, wood floor. He's been in enough factories and warehouses to get the jist.
This one's new.
Alia wanders in to check on both the patient, and on Cat. She sighs, knowing that the one sleeping uprigght is going to be sore later. The young lady walks over to Flint next, brushing her black hair back as she moves. her hoodie has a bullet hole in it from the near miss from a long-range ricochet still evident. Her reminder of how close she came… and how close it came to that messing everything up. She stands there a moment or two, then asks softly, in one barely whispered word "Awake?"
Scrubby chest faltered flat over a breath that's more wheeze than exhalation, Flint is slow to slit his eyes open. If he opens his eyes he's admitting he's awake. If he admits he's awake, he has to acknowledge the reality of lying flat out on his back in a humid warehouse in China, shirtless and blanched pale by blood loss.
Radioactive light is sickly slow to seep into the rings of his irises, the overall effect eery in the semidark. Everything hurts.
And he's still dim enough to reach vacantly up over his own ribcage to feel carefully after the point of entry.
"Yeah," rasped to the skull of the 20-something Jane Doe standing over him, he feels after his cell phone next. Gone. And then his face. Still intact. "You a doctor?"
Alia shakes her head. "No." She offers a drink from a bottle of water that she had retrieved earlier. SShe doesn't lie about what she is, and isn't.
"That's okay," says Flint, disappointment in his acceptance lined fine into crow's feet already cinched stark under the knit of his brow. "Me either." He needs alcohol, painkillers, a smoke and his prescriptions, probably not in that order. And he didn't even bring a spare change of underwear.
Offered water examined, sniffed at and turned down after a dry roll of his tongue, he turns his head enough to take in Cat before he falls still again. "Anyone die?"
"Just your shirt," comes a smooth answer from the door, where Noah Bennet's broad-shouldered frame stands, arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the doorjam. "We tried everything to save it but it was just too late," that he's smiling means he's at least trying to lighten up from everything that's happened, but that he's not asleep means worry over the success of the mission is still prickling his nerves and keeping him awake.
"You've been out for almost eight hours," Bennet explains as he leans away from the inside of the doorway, slowly walking into the room. "Chesterfield's the one who patched you up," Bennet notes with a nod towards Cat's sleeping form, hunched against the wall as she is. "You lost some blood," is also perhaps the obvious thing to say, "but you'll last the night. You said something about a teleporter after she stitched you up when I came to check on you."
One brow sliwly rises as Noah turns his head, just enough that the dim light coming in through the windows reflects off of his glasses. "Cat thinks it's someone named Elias. That ring a bell to you?"
Alia remains quiet as Bennet takes the question and fields it admirably. She steps back and has very little to say, as usual.
Deckard's been shot before. Scars stand out shiny against his tatty hide — spidering out from his sternum and across his right side in a veritable constellation of accumulated damage. All of it acquried within the last year. Most of it friendly fire.
Right hand flexed open and clenched shut, bristly head tipped back against a methodical cinch of muscle tightning down the length of his spine, he takes in Noah as well as he can through gnawing distraction — no skeleton on file to go with familiar mien and glasses and voice. There's more mass there than he might've expected to see.
"Maybe," would probably have more attitude attached to it if he didn't grunt and pinch off the unholy light of his stare into a hard blink midway through.
"I don't konw the nature of your arrangement with whoever he is, but we could use his help getting ourselves out of this country before the PLA sniffs us out. It's only going to be a matter of time before they send a psychometer or a postcognitive down here from wherever their military trains people like that." Bennet tucks his hands into the pockets of his slacks, eyes focused down on Flint before noticing something. He squints in the dim light, then slowly drops into a crouch, hands coming out of his pockets and forearms resting over his knees.
The inspecting stare Bennet gives comes with a motion of one hand, moving up to the side of Deckard's neck, thumb swabbing over something to see if it's just dirt, but those two tiny black marks on the side of Flint's neck aren't grime or dried blood. "Radio isotope…" he says without context, lifting his hand away from Deckard's neck.
"I don't remember you having that when you first joined us," Noah admits with a lift of one brow slowly into the air. "Do you remember getting an injection there, from a needle gun?" And when Bennet says needle gun, he holds his hands apart a foot's span.
Alia looks over her shoulder at the question, but says very little as she digs through her backpack. She returns a few moments later… two ibuprofien in hand… she offers them and the water silently.
The crook-turned-Ferryman-turned-Company-Agent-turned-crook's assortment of tattoos is a lot like his assortment of scars: scattered and irregular. Crude eyes sketched in prison-ink blue under his clavicles stare unblinking at the ceiling while Flint's glare knifes sleekly open again at Noah's touch. He knows the spot — somewhere between Genesis 4:14 inked across a cross at the scruff of his neck and another cross at his shoulder bound in thick, scaly coils.
It could be worse. It could still be a swastika.
In this case, The Mark alone is bad enough and Deckard's nose rankles at contact as much as it does invasive exposure. The slow lift of Noah's brow that accompanies it doesn't help.
So he says, "No."
Conveniently it's the truth, even if he knows exactly where it came from, irritable guilt drawn taut through the dusty grey of his midnight o'clock shadow when he refocuses hazily on Alia with her two Ibuprofien. "Seriously?"
Noah's reaction is a silent one, levering himself up from the crouch at the response of a man who speaks as little as Alia Chavez does. Looking to the Ibuprofin offered to Deckard, Bennet arches one brow and looks down to him with a thoughtful expression. "I forgot to pack a pharmacy when we left Seattle," is a more sarcastic response than Bennet would normally offer, but as he's turning away from Deckard, hands tucked into the pockets of his slacks again, there's slight mirth in his voice when he adds, "I'd take what I can get if I were in your position." Whether it would do anything for him is another matter entirely.
Moving a few paces away as he does, Bennet isn't leaving, despite however much privacy Deckard may enjoy at the moment. "What are your plans when we get back to the States?" He's being optimistic for the time being, and as Noah reclaims his position leaning inside of the door, his attention squares back on Flint again. "You disappeared on us for a while there, rumors started." He doesn't ask where he's been.
"I don't think your 'Hotel' collapsed in on itself yet," is perhaps hopeful optimism on Bennet's part.
"Opiate induced coma," graveled out (optimistically!) with a side of severe cramping or something that surely feels that way, Flint makes his toesies into fists and closes his eyes again. Cold sweat is quick to collect in the hollows of his temples and he reaches — blindly and then with one eye cracked open — for Alia's pills.
"I don't have any," sounds more like an actual answer a beat later, even if he has to struggle to keep his teeth from showing aggressive past the tension in his neck. "No point."
In go the pills. They stick dry in his throat until he concedes to take the water as well, a single chuffed cough enough to convince him that he never wants to have any cause to cough in his life ever again.
"You came all the way out here," Noah begins, already starting to sound like an unsolicited lecture; the best kind of lecture. "You got yourself shot because Benjamin asked you, and I don't know what else you have going for you." Lifting up one hand, Noah slides off his glasses, bringing them down so he can scrub a fingerprint out of one lens with the front of his shirt. "If you ask me," which he didn't, "the point is to have something to keep on going on for."
The glasses are moved away from Bennet's shirt, but before he puts them back on, he's considering Deckard's prone form, then Alia, then back to Deckard again. "You've put yourself in harms way for us more times than I think anyone might have expected of you, Flint. You may not always have my trust, but at the very least you've earned my respect."
Finally sliding his glasses on, Bennet doesn't seem to be making his point, at least not right up until the very end. "If you don't have anything else lined up, we could probably use your help come November 8th."
"I'm sleeping with a psychotherapist," says Flint, middle hitching into another miserable clench that's mirrored through the jackal length of his face. Eyes ringed a shade wilder when he recovers, he pants for a beat or two and elaborates (simply): "Ten out of ten."
That sexytimes and all associated hooplah rate high on Flint's short and flimsy list of reasons to keep existing is probably not a tremendous surprise. Ten out of ten aside, he looks more miserable than ever for having said so, which — given his current state — is a pretty impressive accomplishment.
Drawn and damp, he fumbles water gracelessly away from himself after an awkward beat. "I'm going to be in Queens," sounds more like a confession than it probably should. "Everything is on fire. Can you asphyxiate me or something?"
The response at first doesn't make any sense to Bennet, the sudden deflection away from the topic at hand. One eye narrows, his brows crease with two vertical lines above the bridge of his nose and lips part in questioning silence. It takes a moment, to try and wrap his head around the sudden emergence of the self-deprecation. "Flint," continues to sound like a lecture, though Bennet's normally used to taking that tone with his teenage son more so than a man the same age as he is.
"If you're going to be in Queens, then you could coordinate with some of our people who are going to be trapped there." Leaning off of the door casing, Noah isn't quite relenting on the issue, especially not in the face of that last request and the decided lack of humor in it. "We have some video record of personal accounts, what's going to happen. Even if you'd rather feel sorry for yourself you could at least tell someone what you saw when we get back. It might save the life of someone who doesn't want to die."
Trying to spare the resentment in his tone, it's too easy to snap at Flint, too easy to give in to that sharp-edged tone, which is probably exactly what Deckard wants. It makes it easier not to accept someone's charity when you make them not want to give it any longer.
For once, Alia Chavez looks… unnerved as she figures out what they are talking about… and her own memories suddenly surface, leaving her shivering a moment as she takes one step… then two… then enough to lean back aggainst a wall as she tries to remove her own memory of what she saw happening to HER that day. She quietly sinks to the floor to sit down, reaching into one of the two side pouches on her backpack… what she pulls out might be the most unexpected thing she's had with her all trip. A deck of cards. She deals out a set of the cards infront of her… then speaks in almost a whisper as she turns them over. It is, likely, the most words in a single time either man will ever hear out of the young lady.
"The crumbling Tower is behind us. The Wheel of Fortune spins, second chances. The Fool, a wild card, our own inner strength. Queen of Swords, truth, honesty light our way." She pauses as she looks at the last card. "The World. Our home. Our hope." She looks at the Tarot cards, and pauses to wonder at the the spread.
Flint's record with father-figures is easily as pitted and scarred as the hide he's in — minimal age difference less of a factor when you don't know how old you are and don't really care besides. If the jut of his overlarge ears could lie back any further at the sound of his first name in itailcs they would. As things are, his narrow jaw juts and his glare hardens under the overhang of his brow, abruptly only a few spectral degrees from hatred in the shadows cast by his own clammy skull.
It's Alia who spins him the rest of the way, for all that it takes him a solid minute to figure out what she's doing over there. The fact that he manages to grind out a level, "Get her out of here," is a testament to the fact that he some semblance of self-control, even with the cords in his neck standing out like weaves of copper wire and anger bit hard into the bridge of his nose. "Mes affaires font mal au cul."
Bennet's attention first flicks over to Cat where she's slouched against the wall asleep, or at least doing a valiant effort of pretending amidst this awkward . When he looks down to Alia and what she's got spread out. There's a click of his tongue, a look back to Deckard and a squint of trying to figure out whatever just set him off that Alia managed to do that Bennet didn't— and— fails.
"Come on," Bennet urges, jerking his head to the door, "I think Mister Deckard wants his privacy." It's as polite as Bennet can manage, for all that a litany of unexpected French has caught him off guard. Bennet's polite tone perhaps is also the vinegar to Deckard's lye, trying to neutralize a little bit of the sting his tone may have delivered, for Alia's sake more so than anything.
Stepping between the two, Bennet affords his back to Deckard when he looks down to Alia to suggest the door to her, his expression more pleading than anything. It's clear he doesn't have patience or desire to try and mediate between the two, nor does he want Flint getting up and straining his injury. "She didnt mean anything by it," is unknowing appeasement, or rather the attempt at it.
Alia winces at the harsh tone. The second words may not be understood for exact meaning… but the intent of 'not wanted here is made intensely obvious. She quietly picks the cards up, slipping them back into their box, then picks up her bag, which rattles slightly, now that the bottle of pain pills is open, and the cotton wadding that was in it is no longer in place, and walks out of the room without a further sound. She does not applogize, nor explain. She didn't need Bennet to tell her that she had wore out her welcome, and, in fact, seems rather used to it as she wanders off to find somewhere else to sit and comptemplate the night away.
After all, it isn't the first time she's been chased out after a card was dealt. It seems, she might be lucky enouggh that it won't be the last.
Stonily quiet through the process of Alia shuffling out into quarters without him in them, Flint hurts too much for his temper to really take hold. The more tense he lets himself get the worse he feels, and it's a pretty pathetic matter of seconds before he's dialed back down to a simple, "Leave me alone."
As Bennet lets Alia leave first, his attention remains squared on Flint for a few longer moments, his expression inscrutably guarded behind the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, the frown creasing his lips slightly easier to read, but whether its disappointment or not isn't clear. He says nothing in departure, just turns for the open doorway to leave Deckard in the middling light of street lamps spilling in through the high and narrow windows.
He may not be physically alone in the room, but once Bennet and Alia have left he is in every other way that matters. Footsteps echo distant down the second floor hall, no one else sounds like their awake to hear it. Cicadas outside chirp noisily, though, so there's that aside from the sound of Flint's own breathing.
By morning they'll all be gone anyway, if all goes well.
And Flint can be alone.