Totally Fucked

Participants:

alexander_icon.gif lucrezia_icon.gif teo_icon.gif

Scene Title Totally Fucked
Synopsis Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
Date January 9, 2008

The Bronx — Abby, Alexander, and Teo's Apartment

It's not overly spacious, It's a New York area apartment. But it suits it's residents purposes. An open kitchen, crammed with all the accoutrements needed to cook, a dining table shoved against the far wall with chairs tucked in. A living room with a fairly new red suede couch shoved up against a window and TV set opposite on a stand makes up the rest of the communal living area. It looks fairly newly occupied and the personal touches not put to it yet. Five doors down a hall lead to three separate bedrooms, a bathroom and linen closet. What's behind the doors remains a mystery unless one of the residents leaves a door open, though if someone knows the residents, the simple gold cross above one door indicates where the woman in this place lives.


Few people truly appreciate the difference that six minutes can make in their lives, Teodoro Laudani no doubt chief among them. Six minutes. That's how close Teo came to averting disaster. If he'd just waited for six more minutes, he would have ended up passing his aunt in the lobby of Siann Hall while en route to deal with his own clandestine crisis and the rest of his life from minute seven on would have sorted out much differently. But, he didn't. And, so, six minutes later…

Knock, knock.

Al's at home. Al at home, when he has one, is a very quiet creature. Not much of a drinker. There's soft music playing, actually - Bach, from a tiny portable cd player fitted with absurd little yellow speakers. He's curled up on the couch reading 'Huck Finn', which he sets aside, before scuffing over to the door and opening it, the chain latch still in place. He's clad only in white t-shirt and dark jeans.

Don't try too hard. Two steps over the threshold and still in the process of hastily shrugging scraps of mink from her shoulders, Lucrezia replies with the exhale of a heavy held breath and a relieved, "Good." One step later and she's curling her fingers in Alexander's shirt and yanking him bodily closer in order to commence with almost every man's wet dream — the sudden smooch. Hey! There's tongue in there!

This is….A) a hallucination, B) the beginning of a porno, or C) some kind of a gag. Right? Al makes a muffled noise of surprise that is very far from protest. He's tentative, though, as if really not certain what brought this on. Which is precisely what he asks, once he's untangled himself enough to speak coherently. "I…..uh….what's that for?" he wonders, stunned into stupidity, and flushed bright red.

Americans. A beautiful woman has just come to your house and initiated less-than-familial liplock with you in under a minute. Just go with it, Alex. Ask questions a couple three hours from now after you've got your breath and just before you go under for the third round. Don't fuck it up by being rational right off the bat. Luckily, Lucrezia isn't much in the mood for talking. "Shut up." She hooks both hands into the waistband of Alex's pants and goes about unbuttoning, unzipping, and/or otherwise unfastening them with deft and dexterous fingers. But only halfway. Her right hand repositions itself on the young man's cheek as she dives in to suck face again.

Sweet reason is already out the door and on her bike, pedaling rapidly. Yeah, the honey trap is literally the oldest trick in the book - witness Samson and Delilah, but what's Al going to do? Refuse? He's the one non-Christian in this household. So he only hesitates a moment, before responding with enthusiasm. He does, however, begin to retreat towards his bedroom - sort of a hallway tango. Thank god he washed the sheets just the other day.

And thus, they leave a sheer and lacy slash dingy cotton breadcrumb trail of sin all the way from the living room, down the hallway, and in to Alex's room; little black dress, white t-shirt, brassiere, blue jeans, OH SWEET MERCIFUL JESUS thong panties, boxer shorts. Door slam. Cue the surprisingly violent mattress coil spring testing. Because, you see, while this is going on, one of them is witnessing second-hand the rebirth of a monster in her mind's eye. The other one? He's witnessing boobs. Big, beautiful, bouncing boobs.

Time transpires.

It's just breaking dawn, really. And Al….well, Al has been more worn out on a few occasions, but not many. The tentative rays of the winter sun are shimmering on the checkerboard linoleum as Al sits rather droopily at the kitchen table. There's the scent of brewing coffee, and two cups on the table - one before him, one presumably waiting for his houseguest. He's heavy-lidded, sleepy, and clad only in a pair of pajama pants. And his back - well, the usual marble pallor is scored by many a scarlet line. Lucrezia gets rough with those nails.

Fuck everything, Teo is tired. It isn't easy, living a life that's a comedy of errors. You see, his hands are very tired from picking up the telephone so much, and the constant droning of winter wind has probably slaughtered his vestibular cells and ability to hear the frequency that the world's smallest violin ought otherwise to be playing for him. He unlocks the door. The door proceeds to stick. Lacking the gusto to kick it open with his usual proportioned violence, he lets gravity do most of the work.

And falls into the apartment, looking as disheveled as the end of his work day tends to find him. A moth slides out of the hood draped over the back of his jacket collar, fluttering high along the wall and meandering the subtle thermals in the air in search of something that isn't entirely friendly nor floral in nature. "Al? You just get up?" He shuts the door the same way he'd opened it: falling, a graceless crash of muscle and bone against wood.

One needn't have the subtle abilities of a moth to note the perfume lingering in the air of the apartment - expensive, exotic, refined….and familiar. Not to mention - all over Al himself, overlaid with the scent of sweat and the frankincense and myrrh soap he uses himself. "Yeah," he says, blushing despite himself, the picture of embarrassment. "Uh, you wanna coffee?" Look, he anticipated you coming home. Isn't he the good little housewife?

No! Not really. But Teo has no idea of that so far. For whatever reason, his well-honed terrorist senses aren't functioning at peak acuity right now. He notices the perfume in the air, writes it off as Abby's experiment, despite that the resonance of familiarity with that particular fragrance lies in a diametrically opposite direction from the young Baptist, and that, intellectually, he knows that Abigail's avoiding the residence while Wu-Long's dogging her heels. He lurches off the door, reaching up to yank the zipper down from his throat. "Sure, gra

"Fucking A." He fires off one rapid step forward, nearly falls off his ass as he grabs a sprinting cat out of the air swiftly as a snake-bite: the feline had been launching toward the insect floating through the air. There's a murmur of Italian, grumbling affection. Captured, the cat spares him its claws.

"I still ain't named that damn thing," Al says. "Hell, give it here, we'll figure out if it's a boy or a girl. I don't wanna name it Fluffy if it's a tom, for one." He holds out perfectly ordinary hands, rather than reaching for it with his power. Telekinesis tends to scare the hell out of animals.

It's in that moment, while Alex's hands are extended toward Teo in an somehow perversely ironic gesture that suggests anticipation of being bequeathed pussy, there's a bit of noise that tumbles its way down the hallway and all the way up against the eardrums of both boys. It's either the opening or closing of a dresser drawer come from behind closed doors. Maybe. Who can be sure?

The length of cat is summarily dumped into Al's hands, while Teo turns on an arrhythmic stumping of steps, yanking his jacket off in a brusque motion or three. He's somewhere in the process of thinking about taking off his shoes when the sound from further within elicits a twitch of his head, a glance over his shoulder, before it falls to the floor, the sinuous trail of female underthings winding their way to his friend's bedroom. His train of thought continues while the rest of him stops moving entirely, his shoulders boxed into rigid right angles, his features quiescent.

Alexander takes the cat, who makes a little mewl of protest. And then his gaze follows Teo's, and Al turns red again. T here's just no good explanation for that thong, really. He's still, not offering excuses - just looking to Teo with something like fear, like he's expecting a beating. Maybe he is.

If this feeling had a soundtrack, it would be halfway between a growl and a sinking scrape, a long abrasion like a foot grinding into broken glass. Teo would know. He's walked over a lot of smashed windows before. When he remembers to breath, he yanks his jacket back on and starts toward the bedroom door, his snowboots falling between the coils and eddies of lacy silk with the grace of something that eerily resembles old practice. He reaches Alexander's bedroom door and opens it.

And he literally finds himself suddenly confronted, nearly nose to nose with — no. No no. A thousand times no. This can't be! Zietta Lucrezia!?! "Mio carino!" What a terribly wonderful surprise — for both of them! Before Teo has any hope of a back-pedaling escape, he finds himself suddenly and firmly entrenched in his aunt's delectable clutches.

It would be overexaggerating to say that Teo is incapable of self-pity. He's Catholic, twenty six years old, good-looking and vain in his own faintly psychotic way. That being said, the circle of his aunt's arm comes crushing in like a noose, and suddenly there's no distance to anything physical so it's survival instinct, really, finding some emotional, with an unsteady breath that sounds like a syllable and is instantly regretted: she smells of myrrh and frankincense, sweat and the hazardous misery he spent most of his teenaged years playing chicken with.

Absurdly, he puts his arms around her, pulls her close as if to hide her nakedness of all things, kissing the corner of her eye. Anger displaces anger. "Stai bene?" His voice is low. He isn't whispering.

Is this Lucrezia at her most cruel… or her most kind? She's not exactly naked, standing there in a t-shirt so recently borrowed from Alexander's dresser drawer, but she is still somehow exposed in a fashion rarely worn for anyone outside of her own reflection. "Bene," she utters against Teo's temple, using the hands that had so insistently disarmed and disrobed the redhead flying solo in the kitchen however many hours ago to clasp her nephew's face just below the earlobe and bestow a kiss on either cheek before leaving to linger like a stain on his lips. "Sto bene." Those words imparted, she then shoves herself a bit brusquely from his grasp, snatches her discarded panties from off the floor in the hall and promptly retreats into the bathroom, closing the door behind her with something just shy of a slam.

Alexander is still utterly silent, waiting perhaps for Teo to round on him with….something. Anger, accusation, disgust. The cat has settled and begun to knead his flannel covered lap, utterly ignorant of any tension in the room. He just look to Teo, rather despairingly.

There are a lot of things to be angry at. Personal injury among them, but Teo's bitten down on that, or trying to, his figure stark, still, back turned to Alexander, the cat, and the way that Lucrezia had fluttered off, all.

When it comes, it's a commonplace thing. There's nothing sophisticated about a pissed off Italian.

Four, five footfalls that almost break the chipped wood floor, the ugly noise of them doesn't have enough time to fade before there's an unfriendly hand on Alexander's shoulder, the space between men closed so quickly that one might think Teo might not have bothered with it at all. Teo hits like a hammer. He learned how by hurting himself at first, and though training with Hana might have improved his technique, the underlying principle remains the same before that as the vicious arc his fist is drawing to Al's face.

Despite it being a blow at point blank range….it fails to land. Just goes shunting off to empty air, as Al doesn't flinch, but regards him with that expression of imperial disdain. "You're my best friend, Teo. But you don't get to beat me over that. No man does - you're neither my father nor my DI," he says, very quietly. Teo will find himself held - not affectionately, but frozen in place like a game of Simon Says. "She came to me, Teo. " Apparently she did - there are bruises on him, the marks of teeth, as well as nails.

There's no real surprise for the prison he finds himself in, just as there was a strange void of genuine shock at the overall predicament that frames this situation. It's never beyond Teo to think shit's going to happen. "There's something wrong with her," Teo states, flatly. It's the second thing on his mind, but the first is unbearably personal; he can't bring himself to say it, he can barely bring himself to think it. The look on Alexander's face is making him sick with a sentiment as new to him as the one had confessed mere hours ago.

"There's something wrong with everyone, Teo. What's your point?" Al says, gently. Not quite so lust-blinded he won't hear anything against her, but clearly it's a matter of patience, rather than any real expectation of a life-changing revelation. "Unless 'wrong with her' means 'she got to fuck me first.'"

On some obscure level, Teo is genuinely impressed. On another, more boring level, he's ashamed. On a third, Alexander's words are an unwelcome dash of freezing water against something like red blindness, clarity clawing its way through in aching rivulets and spatters that go straight through Teo's bones. Normally animate, his face doesn't change. Not because he's remembered his poker face, but—

He doesn't have a face for this.

After a moment, he locates his voice somewhere in the pit of his stomach, manages to brush most of the sand and rust off it in time to say: "I won't hit you again. Let me go." He's hoarse, but not impossibly so.

The sounds of a scuffling brewing on the other side of the door are hard to ignore. Lucrezia has her hand on the knob and prepares to dramatically reemerge from her hideaway and rescue her younger lover from her nephew's Sicilian wrath (after her gets a few licks in) but when it all abruptly comes to a silent stop, she, too, takes pause. With her temple pressed up against wood long lost under layer after layer of french vanilla flat paint, she overhears with her own ears portions of their conversation that earn a sickly smug smile. There's something indefinably flattering, after all, in being fought over — regardless the combatants. She is, however, disappointed that Teo so soon allowed the other man to get the better of him and conceded to cessation of hostilities so soon. Was she not worth more than a single blow? Pity. She'd certainly bartered with rough enough trade for more than one earlier…

The bathroom door suddenly swings open and Lucrezia reappears in the hallway as the very image of an extremely unimpressive and jersey-clad queen.

Paused.


Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite "The boy stood on
the burning deck". Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy.

— Elisabeth Bishop, Casabianca


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January 8th: Of Salami, Stocks, and Saurkraut...
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January 9th: Easy
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