Participants:
| Scene Title | Sift |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | There's a lot of bullshit, blatant misunderstanding, and bad history to get through to get to what they're looking for. Eventually, with some assistance from a friend, estranged letters sort of kind of wind on the same page, at least, before they actually get around to reopening up the letter. |
| Date | November 3, 2009 |
Old Lucy's — Upstairs
Though one might remember when a certain fiery woman lived here… Now the living area above Old Lucy's has changed hands. The open living room and kitchen are homey, a commingling of two people's tastes. The leather couch sits kitty corner to a one of red suede and a bit smaller. A large bird cage for it's budgie inhabitant takes up it's own corner beside dark paneled walls. Bookshelves with literary pieces of a variety both academic and not take up another small section.
The kitchen is large, with a rolling wood and black marble island to give more counter space to work on. Pots and pans hang from the roof and track lighting keeps it not gloomy. A proper oak dining table has been set up with matching chairs instead of the 70's castoff that the residents have been known to own and a bowl of fresh fruit sits in the center.
Down a hall lay's multiple doors. A master bedroom occupied by the oldest resident and occasionally have a pervading smell of whiskey and smoke coming from it when the door is open. A second door with a cross above it, a third with no marking that is occupied by the third resident of the premises. Two other doors lead to a linen closet and bathroom respectively. A black cat with a red velvet collar and a little swarovski charm dangling from it can be found meandering at will.
It's a misty night. Appropriate, really. Makes it that much easier to conduct secret business. Leo's tired after a shift at the Suresh Center, brooding at home in Abby's cozy kitchen. The bar bustles a story below, but here it's quiet. There's the scent of hot cocoa, the black cat ensconced in his lap as Leo pets her slowly. The letter's on the table in front of him, neatly folded, though marred a little with brickdust and water staining - he'd hidden it in an old squat of his, rather than discarded it entirely. His face wears an entirely uncharacteristic expression of weary patience, as he waits for Teo.
Teo still has a key, and his biometrics are still stored in the elaborate computer system wired into the walls of Old Lucy's upper levels. There's a scratching of metal on metal, an unprotesting surrender of hinges, before he slings his long frame in with keyring looping a merrily musical jingle around his thumb. There's a hint of hesitation, of guesswork involved before he angles long strides toward the kitchen doorway, shrugging his jacket looser, popping the button at his throat. "Buona sera," he says, before his tone hangs awkwardly, around the uncertainty of which— name to…
"Leonard," the blackhaired boy says, politely. Long, long ago, before he succumbed to the easy seduction of violence, a patient southern woman, one who'd've got along beautifully with Abby, beat manners into him. That elaborate and almost archaic courtesy, grown trellised on both bitter pride and secret nostalgia. He likes to trot it out when he's not sure how to deal, dust it off like some lavender-scented memento of his grandmother. "There's cocoa, if you want." Like Teo is a stranger come to visit, rather than an old comrade and erstwhile lover. Scarlett greets him with a trill. I haven't eaten your bird. Aren't you proud of me? And then Leo sets her gently on the floor, bottom paws first.
It's a short distance to Scarlett's rump, which Teo closes with a few strides before crossing his ankles over and dropping himself onto the floor with his legs plaited and origamied into Indian style. He never got along with the cat quite as well as his erstwhile roommates did, but his affinity for animals extends past the strict demarcations of not getting his ass kicked by trained dogs when he's trespassing. Not that he's really thinking about dogs right now. Or even the cat; the scuff of fingers he riddles down the black creature's spine is half-hearted, at best.
And the cat isn't long deciding that that isn't good enough. Extricating its tiny black velvet-socked feet, fleeing with a rawr and curlicue wave of its tail. "It's okay if I get the letter from you?" he patches back in, after a desultory shake of his head about the cocoa, which isn't entirely unlike his attitude toward Scarlett, either, though the Sicilian is characterized by unease and a bruise-matted nose instead of self-entitled hauteur. "Just to borrow. I can… I can read it right here if you like."
"It's there," Leo says, quietly, indicating it with a motion of his chin. "You can have it, I think, if you want it. At least, I'm not in a hurry to have it returned." He settles comfortably back in his own chair at the battered table. "You're welcome to read it here and see if you do want to take it." There's none of his crystal-singing anger, none of the thunderous oppression. He's really sort of tentative, like Teodoro's been ill and might be unable to bear startlement or loud sounds. "Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you."
Lifting his head, Teo follows the trajectory of the older man's chin to the table-top, where the letter presumably lies a few inches beyond his sight. He lurches up onto his knees, as ungainly as a tot, his purpled and scab-notched face wading into view over the furniture's blank horizon.
He espies the letter with a sharp eye. Hoops his arm over on top of it, palming the faintly battle-scarred envelope to slide it over to him gently. He thumbs it open. Doesn't open it yet, struck by a certain wariness that whatever message is slotted therein must be greater in its catastrophic power than its slim contours would illuse they had the capacity to contain. He doesn't really notice that he's somehow wound up effectively seated at Leonard's feet. Such a dumpy cub appears contrary to the physical delicacy that Leonard's worried about.
He looks at his handwriting on the cover. Recognizes his own immaculate copperplate; that much hasn't changed between decades, psychic mergings, landslide confusion in its wake. "You were a cop," he remarks, finally. "Do you still think some people belong in jail?"
There's no hesitation in his reply. "I do," he says, calmly. "Absolutely. You don't want a chair?" There's the mild lilt of amused question in his voice, and one of the chairs inches towards him, like one of the Beast's helpful invisible servants.
A glance over Teo's shoulder confirms the chair is approaching, but he shakes his head. "Nah. It's one of my quirks," he says, in a tone that ruefully translates, It's still one of my quirks. He pulls a brief face, trying to ease an itch in his face that he isn't apparently bothered to scratch. His elbows map down onto his folded knees, making him uncharacteristically small. "I was going to go to jail. I'm guessing I didn't tell you that." He swivels the envelope upward a few inches in a quizzical hand, between thumb and forefinger.
There's one of those slow closing-and-openings of his eyes, a breath taken while they're down, before he looks at Teo again. "No, you didn't," he says, very patiently. "Do you remember why you planned to?" His hands rest quietly on his knees, back straight, as one foot edges out. It is, bizarrely and minus the bundle of the fasces, precisely the posture of a Roman magistrate sitting in judgement, though Leo's face is far, far from classically modelled. Sonny made him look a faun's child, face almost a little too mobile.
Teo is inexplicably comfortable seated here. Not just on the floor, cat-level, but particularly at Leonard Shelby's feet, where eye-contact is easily avoided without misconstrued ill manners, and his old comrade, best friend, once- and future-lover presiding over him like an egret determining the fate of a blithe and insignificant goldfish.
"Yeah." The envelope falls back even on his knee. "Because I was— am— one of those people who belong in jail. You already know: you lose a little something when you kill kids. I think it gets worse when you try to get their parents to rape them beforehand. That kind of thing," he says. 'That kind of thing' is the kind of thing you say when describing a family of lintel bric-a-brac options at the souvenier shop. A beat. "Would you have wanted to know?"
"I would have, yes," Leo says, very quietly. "I don't know that you were, Teo. I don't know. By the standards you seem to be applying, I should be in jail. Perhaps even in the chair. It may yet be that I will end there. But you didn't seem to agree, even knowing what I'd done, when I -was- in jail. It wasn't kosher, my not having received a trial….but even if I had, in the full view of the public with a jury of my peers, the results would've been the same. Moab. Verse. Eventual execution."
"Do you remember Verse? I deserved that, Teo. I've committed atrocities. I was and am guilty of crimes of war, of terrorism, arguably of treason against my country. I had then, when I was sent there, and I have since. Did you not have reasons for what you did, though? When did they no longer qualify as sufficient justification? Where did you draw the line? You abandoned people who needed you. People you'd led. We fought against Humanis First, and you weren't there. Because you were, so far as I can tell, bowing again to the dictates of your conscience and the weight of your guilt, and offering them both a sop. You don't absolve guilt by going to jail. You do penance. Perhaps that means you join a monastery and leave as a penitent. Mortify the flesh. Maybe that means you continue to fight those who intend to slaughter me and my kind merely due to a quirk of the genes. Maybe you don't. I don't know what moves you now."
" Me, I'm going to continue fighting. Until I'm killed. Until they capture me again. Until it's safe for us to be who we are, without apology. Perhaps you were a monster, as we are monsters. It may be that monsters are what we need for the duration, until the war is over. You have the luxury of withdrawing. Until they find a way to respin DNA like yarn, I don't." Through all this monologue, his voice remains flat, monotone, only distantly grieved, as he looks down at Teo. As if the couple feet of distance constituted a mountainous height.
It's a greater distance than it looks. Less than a stride's worth of linoleum, whispering distance, arm's reach, such measurements deceptive in their ability to convey intimacy, though Leonard has a startling quantity of words to bridge it with; more, Teo thinks, than he's ever heard the other man share before in all the years he's known him. Flattering, on some level. No more palatable despite that on all others. "I think they stopped qualifying as sufficient justification when I found myself in the unlikely position of needing them" you "and found myself abandoned. And I committed atrocities not because of war, but because I was angry they" you "were taken from me. No principles, no room to acknowledge alternatives, I was just angry. You can pray in jail as easy as you do a fucking monastary, Leonard.
"It's the oddest thing: you've always made yourself out to be a follower in need of a leader, but you've always known exactly what you want to do with yourself, rules of conduct. Fight then die, us versus the perennial them, loyalties. You'll take orders, but you see the world a certain way. Always have, always will. You wouldn't acknowledge the option of withdrawing if it punched you in the nuts.
"You don't get to argue righteousness and loyalty, call it necessary evil, acceptable compromise, then tell me I am wrong for choking on all the bullshit double-standards. Not after what I've been through and done for your people." His lips thin. His face is rigid but his voice is sanguine, despite remaining ironclad in its quiet, the inverse of Leonard's pastelled and blank tone.
Leonard goes pale at that, as if struck. He doesn't look away from Teo, but bows his head in acknowledgement. "I'm sorry," he says, and there is real shame in his voice. "No, you haven't been treated as you deserved, and I apologize for that. I wasn't there when you needed me, either, so I …" He trails off, lame and halt. "And you're right. I don't know another way to deal. I wish I were clever enough to think of some way to help stop all this. And thank you for what you have done. I'm alive, free, and relatively sane due to work you've done, sacrifices you've made, and I don't know of any way to make it up to you."
"It's fine, it's fine," Teo mutters, suddenly embarrassed, red blotching his cheeks and annoyance at himself steaming out of the stagnating pool of unhappy history and bygones. 'Fine' may not be the term for it, but he's done windmilling and screeching banshee resentment, for the large part. "I wish I was that clever, too. I don't know. The only people who are seem to be megalomaniac asshats like Doctor Edward Ray and the Elders of the Petrelli clan, and God knows the world could do without them, so. Maybe it's better we're dumb as fuck. And just. Get shot at. For good causes."
The telekine just looks quietly miserable. As if he'd set aside that perpetual smouldering rage when he took off the Sith costume. "What're you going to do now?" he asks, letting his hands rest limply in his lap.
Abby has arrived.
It's funny that that question tends to be most important when the answer is obvious to no one, not even you yourself. Teo makes a shrug out of his shoulders and his brow, splits the thumb and forefinger of his free hand into a V around his stubbled jaw, scraping rough skin against the grain of the bristle shorn there.
Compacted by his cross-legged sitting style and head bowed, he looks small if not meek by any stretch of the term. "Help out with this bomb shit, I guess. The Vanguard loyalists and their nukes. Eileen asked. Hey—" he glances up, wavers, doesn't look away. It isn't the hardest thing he's ever done, meeting Leonard's eye, not quite. "I checked in with your mole before you guys went to get Helena out. I know it's not much, but I was there. Didn't think another pistol would really help, from the stats of things."
"Then I apologize, and withdraw that accusation," Leo's tone is formal, even in apology. "I spoke in ignorance." His eyes are suspiciously bright, however, and he blinks a little too rapidly. "Let me know if I can help with that nuke thing. God knows they've no reason to want to deal with me, but….strange bedfellows, and all that." He slouches down in his chair a little, loses that carefully upright posture.
Still unread, the letter begins to dent faintly, betraying him, despite that Teo isn't ostensibly suffering from any white-knuckled discomfiture. He's wearing his typical onion layer of clothes, enough to cover up sweat or unsteady breathing, the collapsing cardhouse of his posture. He loosens his digits on the envelope the next moment. The formality is weird. Everything about this is weird. He feels like he should have left more than a letter.
Gold coins or a nice cross or plane tickets to somewhere nice, except that he suspects it would take more than anything you could fit into an envelope to make up for living with him. "Why don't we work?" he finally asks. Like air escaping from a balloon.
Footsteps up the stairs, the creak at the very top is the first indication that someone's coming home. Not like the pink haired woman walks heavy. Locks turn, all the personal home security measures initiated that were put into place by Alec not so long ago and the door is opening to admit the other resident of the above bar apartment. She's oblivious to the turmoil and strife that she's walking into with her grocery bags a plenty at the words of "Why don't we work" Amazing grace hummed beneath her breath. Flint hasn't graced the place with her since the ferryman outing and his statement of dislike about her pink hair.
Leo's voice is oddly gentle. "I don't know, Teo. You don't seem to want to be around me, nor have you for a long time. I think I've been chasing an illusion in you for a long while. Something I wanted to see that wasn't actually there, at least in this version of the world. We got along in the future, at least. But we don't seem to here…." He trails off as Abby comes in, rises from his chair, but doesn't go to her.
Ah, there's a girl. That always changes everything, if you know anything about stories, and Teo does. He gets up too, though he has further to go than Leonard does, and is second to arrive at full upright, boots thumping and unraveling his long legs out of their childish configuration on the floor. "Hey, Abigail," Teodoro says, because that's what you say when someone's hauling groceries in, even if that's following on the tails of cosmically-proportioned relationship awkwardness. He points at her cargo. "Do you need some help?"
"Nope, i'm good. keep talking. Cause it sounds to me like y'all got some talking to do" Pointed, Abigail looks at the both of them. She heard what she heard on the way in. Oh yes she did. "My Momma'd kill me if I'd stopped a talk between you two, ohhh yes. So you both get to figuring out how to get both your heads on straights and how to love each other without trying to tear each other apart. Or no dinner"
Towards the kitchen she moves, kicking off boots as she goes so that she doesn't mess up the carpet with a blue eye'd gaze for both. "If you need me to get the heck out, then let me know and I can go downstairs"
Now it's Leo's turn to deflate like a pricked balloon. He opens his mouth as if to argue, and there's a spark of his old temper flaring. But it does as quickly as it appeared, and he moves to help her put the groceries away, too. "I don't know if Teo wants to," he says, quietly. Miraculously, there isn't even any sulking or defensiveness in his voice. Just uncertainty.
Given Teo has no telekinesis, he is unable to assist with the unpacking of groceries unless he uses his hands and she's already made it abundantly clear that to do so would be to risk losing them. He's supposed to talk. Leonard speaks first, and while Teodoro is initially glad he doesn't have to say anything immediately, those seven words leave him feeling something other than strict or simple gratitude.
He rubs his face in one hand, tilts back on his heels until he lands the seat of his pants on the dining table's edge. "I don't know. I don't fucking know. Maybe some things need temperate conditions and… and— good topsoil and stuff to grow proper." Did he really just fall back on an elaborate gardening metaphor? Teo almost makes a face at himself, doesn't, ends up staring at the faucet. "It's not like we didn't try."
"Did you try hard enough, or did you both lapse into silence and revert back to using sign language? Maybe you both need to try like couple counseling" She relinquishes some bags to leonard, not biting off his hands when he dares to near for some of the bags and holds out two of the blue fabric bags for Teo to take, an invitation to come to close quarters.
"Really, the both of you fit each other. In some really strange way. I mean, when you're apart, you both rattle at the bars at whomever the other is with, and when you're together…" Well. Walls have ears. In the past. lately she hasn't heard anything. "Maybe, to follow your gardening train of thought there Teo - Maybe you both need to get the heck out of New York where there isn't terrorists, and bad men with bad abilities and super secret government employee's raining havoc down around your necks. Stress is such a bad thing" She knows, heavens Abby knows. "Stress can kill a relationship as much as Neglect can. Maybe you need to just be the both of you and out on a boat on the ocean where there's no armageddon impending and threatening to tear you both apart"
She leans over, placing a kiss on the apple of Leonards cheek. "because heaven above, I can't see the both of you being happy with anyone else. Maybe, you have to try a different angle?"
Lapsing into aggrieved silence in …3….2…."I've been guilty of that a lot," Leo says. Audibly, no less. "But Abby, he doesn't remember me," he adds, gently. Still in that pussyfoot tone of voice. "Not really. And right now, Armageddon is impending. Again. The rest of the Vanguard, the ones that didn't throw the Emperor down the energy well, have a nuke." He sounds more bemused than anything else. Like having a relationship talk as the spectre of atomic death creeps up on them like shadows at evening is just entirely too surreal.
Right. 'What he said,' Teo says, with a waving gesture of the envelope in the other man's direction. There is Armageddon impending, with nuclear things, and that is not only bad for metaphorical vegetable gardens but also for romance, especially ones that have suffered as many situational setbacks and personality flaws as theirs has. There's some kind of spectacular role-reversal going on: the Sicilian left off the sound of his own voice and Leonard actively forming answers.
"Alexander Knight! That is a piss poor excuse and you know it. He can't remember me" He gets evil eye'd. "He can't remember me." Thunk goes a jug of tomatoe juice on the counter. "And if his amnesia wasn't unnaturally induced, would you still be acting like this?" She looks over to Teo, blue eyes settling on him. "And you're not immune from their either, thank you very much. It does take two to tango"
"If it'd been something that'd been done to him, no," Leo says, still keeping his voice even, calm. "But he had this done to himself. And while his reasons may be perfectly valid, I was one of the casualties. I can't think of a more total rejection, Abby. I can't. If he'd rather forget, who'm I to go running after him? And I do remember. It didn't end well. This was the result." The dark gaze slips sideways to Teo, opaque, unreadable. He takes the jug of tomato juice, opens the fridge with purely mundane hands, sets it in the door shelf. "He used to be my friend, and I owe him a lot. If I can help him out, I certainly will. But he doesn't want me like that, and he hasn't for a long time."
In some dislocated part of Teo's brain, he's privately amazed that the woman actually said 'It does take two to tango' to him out loud. Nobody says that anymore. He's foreign, and he knows that. Of course this dislocated part of Teo's brain is largely irrelevant to the situation, and the rest of his, as of current, is weighing the new information served and theories posited by his companions slightly more constructively.
The prospect of never ever being happy with anybody else is not new, and nor is the intimation, explicit enough by now, of the crushing misery of having been with Leonard the past few months, even if they'd apparently gotten over the ditch and spiked hurdles and pit traps of other relationships, disloyalty, and insult. Teo puts groceries away, item by item, maneuvering through space shared with Abigail and Leonard as if it's still last year.
"I can get a boat," he says, presently, with a canine sniff. The letter's sequestered away in his jacket by now, out of harm's way. "After nuclear Armageddon, if we still want talk about this. And you haven't moved on. You don't owe me anything."
Swivel the blue eyes to Teo. "You didn't tell him?"
Of course she's not referring to 'hey, i mindwiped to protect everyone' no, she doesn't mean that. Eyes swivel again in her skull as she passes over a bag full of produce for her sludge and whatever else she keeps in the fridge. "He asked me where Alexander was. That last he knew, Al took off and.. Leo, he didn't forget you. He only forgot that you were face changed to protect yourself. Save as he had his memory changed, altered, to protect you and others. He sacrificed something, something that he holds dear. Same as you sacrificed your identity from before, what you held dear, to protect yourself and protect others. Stop looking at it like he did it to slight you and look at it as a gift. Look at it as a strange chance to re-learn him, and he you."
Not that she's frankly expecting anything she says to make an impact on Leonard. Teo seems to be willing, to meet halfway in Abigail's eyes. "I'd give my left foot and maybe my right for Flint to look at me the way Teo looks at you, the way you looked at him."
Now Leo's entirely abashed. He peers between the pair of them, and that slow blush rises. For all that Sonny reworked most of his coloring, he didn't make him any less pale. "No, he didn't tell me that," he says, and his tone is oddly not defensive. "I didn't know." More simply wondering. "I'm sorry. I guess I've been taking it all too personal."
Bagged bread swings up into the cupboard, settles, sliding plastic against doily-perforated paper. Flour, then, and a contraption that mystifies Teo but would be known to those who bake as a sifter. He almost drops it and steps on it and breaks it when she mentions Flint, turns back, almost forgetting to be vaguely embarrassed and distinctly surprised that that minor detail matters.
At all, never mind how much. "We look at each other like we're about to have aneurysms or a suicidal incidence of clinical depression, but grazie," he answers, straightening his jacket with a pull on lapels. He manages to meet Leonard's gaze for all of about two seconds. "Offer's on the table, but you don't really need to decide until the threat of nuclear war 's no longer realistic."
It aerates the flour Teo, makes for a more even crumb and lighter baked good. Fluffy as opposed to heavy. Every good southern woman knows this. They're born from between their mothers legs with an innate knowledge of baking and baking utensils. Unless your name is Lola, that it's an innate knowledge of how to lock pick. "Why does that not surprise me that he neglected that small nugget of information and no, you do take things personal, but if you didn't, then I suppose that would be one less thing for Teo to love about you. Which he does, or he wouldn't have stayed here and put stuff away, while I jabber off like some sort of relationship therapist of which, I am not." A can of tomatoe soup is put away at the confused look on Teo's face.
"Flint and I are sleeping together, in as much as, when I don't have pink hair that he hates, we sleep together. Something you probably forgot or maybe you didn't know. I can't remember. I haven't seen him in… a while now though. Pink hair, don't you know. Scares away even homeless former criminals"
Can of mushroom soup is put away and some minute rice.
"I think, that that's a fair plan. Take the time until this armageddon passes, and then, take this fresh start. Take that darned boat and just get out of town and just be in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight and only the two of you. No roommates, no nuclear bombs dropping, no terrorist banging on the door or what have you. Just the two of you"
The idea makes Leo profoundly uneasy. But he doesn't dare argue with Abby. He just nods, and finishes putting away the last of the supplies. "Okay," he says, and his voice is still tentative,
"Sometimes old people are old-fashioned." Sometimes old people kill younger people for being assholes, also, but Teo says that anyway, consolation for the pink-tressed woman and a fond bit ribbing for the graverobber, who is fortunately not present, or else Teodoro might have his arm bent the wrong way for his trouble.
As for the other thing, he's as comfortable with this resolution as he possibly could be. Insofar as it hasn't really resolved anything. He's better at holding patterns than he is at long shots, these days: he used to be an expert. It's kind of bizarre that Abigail's doing all the talking, now, but none of the words that she tosses out at them jolt him as particularly objectionable, despite some assumptions or extrapolations made that probably lack for accuracy given Teo's recent amnesia and difficulties with honesty.
"You're still my friend," he says, to the zone of air above Leonard's left shoulder.
And she can see the uneasiness in Leonard and sighs. "or you know, do what you both want to do and if that means me heading out to stay at Hokuto's for the night, then I can do that and you two can have the place to yourselves" She'd try and find Flint but that's like trying to find a strand of hair in a haystack. Infinitely worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack. "You know, actually, Lemme go get an overnight bag, and I'm going to do that. Heavens knows, there's more than enough rubber in this house for you both to just go at it all night if it so pleased you. But really, you both gotta stop looking so hang dog and just.. hanging up on each other. Some day, someday one or both of you aren't gonna be here and you're gonna regret the time you didn't spend with each other"
No room for arguing, the pinky lady is leaving the rest of the groceries for the two to sort and heading for her bedroom. "Maybe she'll wanna go out for chinese…" She muses.
"That's really not necessary, Abby," Leo says, and he's got those high spots of color on his cheeks. "It….really, it's not. I should, uh, take a shower and get to bed, I've got another day shift tomorrow." He nods at Teo. "You're still mine, and I do owe you," he insists, quietly.
"Too bad! I've made up my mind!" Comes from the hallway as Abby disappears into her room.
It probably wouldn't be helpful to this conversation at all, if Teo were to point out that last the erstwhile healer had given someone he was dating advice on how to deal with him, sex had been deliberately struck off the menu. It's vertigo and fugue for the second time to realize how much things had changed, though it throws into equally harsh perspective what remains the same.
Teo stops staring at the ceiling when he guesses the flaming color of his friend's face has finally soothed down to fair and normal. "We can just stand around and fuckin' pretend to be constructive until she's gone," he suggests, dry to cover up the clumsy wreck left of his post-dated invitation and the letter he still hasn't dredged up the courage to read. "Have a good day at work."
"Are you gonna read that?" Leo says, looking at the letter. "Might nudge your memory. Or…..I…uh…" He gives up, sets about cleaning up the remains of his cocoa.
Oh, yeah. "Oh, yeah." Disoriented by the redolence of cocoa and an amputated sense of deja-vu, Teo starts, glances down at the wedge of white paper peeking out of his coat, and his throat moves once. It'd be a good thing to remember, surely, or at least not all bad. He hedges. "Yeah. I'll take it to the living room. Light's better." He turns on a heel, frees envelope with one hand, drops the switch with his other.