Participants:
| Scene Title | What Purpose |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | It's kind of like an awkward morning after - cigarettes are available, someone hates themself, and the bed is wreck. Except everyone is dressed already. |
| Date | February 22, 2009 |
The Happy Dagger: Basement Tenements
It's a bedroom, for all intents and purposes. There's even a window, although it's high up on the wall, and barred with grill and glass. Should someone peek, they'll only see dirty alley way and the flat, nondescript backdrop of a separate building beyond that. The room itself is bleak, if comfortable. The walls are cement and unpainted, the floor cheaply carpeted and the bed adequately dressed, a single thing pushed into the corner of the room. An empty book case gapes from the opposite wall, and a heavy oak trunk, something of an antique and actual worth, rests next to it, previously empty but now filled with at least most of the room occupant's belongings.
Two doors after that, one that stays locked and leads to out, wherever out is, and the other torn off its hinges to reveal a very basic, slightly rundown bathroom. But it works, hot water running at will, a working toilet, partially cracked mirror moderately clean, and towels and bare necessities provided.
It's designed for existing. But not much more than that.
Daylight has begun to filter in through the apartment's single barred window. Blue at first, foggy and cool, now fading into a more industrial shade of grey. Deckard hasn't slept more than an hour or two, total. Pain stirs him out of some unrelated nightmare's grasp every few minutes, stiffens his back against the bedside he's seated against. He hasn't moved much from that spot, really. Blood dried sticky black across his face and down the side of his neck has cracked and flaked loose from some of the better defined lines around jaw and eye socket. Pale lines criss-cross the creases in both hands, one at his side and one in his lap, but it's pretty clear he hasn't made it far enough to bother with cleaning up past whatever he's been up to with the bloody sheets spilled onto the floor around him.
Abigail's gone. He watched her for a while, before they came and took her, and didn't manage to raise much of a protest once they did. He's sickly, washed out. More undead than usual. And currently peering dimly past the slow rise and fall of his bloodied chest to watch the rectangle of colorless light from the window making its dispassionate way across one of his ankles stretched out before him.
The hollow echoes of light footsteps might feel almost dreamlike, if not for the louder way vibrations can carry through the floor, and these ones do, picking up details of weight, the subtler scuff of shoes against the ground. A key in a lock, twisting and manipulating metal until it clicks unlocked, gently, and the door opens. From this vantage point, two feet appear, perhaps familiar ones clad in leather shoes, and the settling of a cane, the white point of metal perhaps visible to Deckard beneath the sheath of black polished wood.
"Bloody hell, what a mess."
The door falls shut again, Logan entering the room at a few, slow paces, wearing clothes much the same as last night, save for the addition of a black woolen coat that hangs open. He probably hasn't slept. "How are we feeling this morning?" he asks, his voice gentle, quiet. "Hopefully a little chattier, I would think."
"I think I'm dying." Just an observation. Deckard's familiar with the galloping pace of a healthy heart. His doesn't have much in common with it, too fast or two slow depending on whether or not he lies down and for how long. He's still sweating, if not so much as before. Distinctly clammy despite the comfortable temperature in here. Distaste and dismay cinch at the corner of his remaining eye, sketching harsh at crows feet and frown lines when he turns his head a little ways away, shielding the empty mess of a socket Logan made the night before from easy scrutiny. Somehow or another he had hoped they wouldn't have to talk again.
"What do you want to know?"
Click, step step, click— the rhythm and interplay of his footsteps with the cane is deliberate. Logan doesn't carry a limp in his step, after all, but the ostentatious accessory is something to be enjoyed, perhaps. He moves towards the flat-lidded chest pushed against the wall no so far from Deckard, but far enough, moving to perch upon it. One leg rests comfortably, the other angled out a little straighter than necessary, on the cane side of things in fact, despite his lack of flaw in his gait. He rests the cane across his thighs, balancing it there, the wolf silently snarling at Deckard on it's sharper angle.
"I want to know what you came here for," Logan says, his voice even and crisp, but largely unthreatening in tone if not his words. "For who. For what purpose. And I want the truth. If I get it, you won't have to die in this room, or leave this place a blind man."
There is no change in Deckard's expression that might betray any kind of relief or scattered hope that Logan might be telling the truth. Likely because neither exists to be emoted. A little breathless even after only that much dialogue, he knits his brow and looks away from John and his cane. Back through the wall while he catches his breath. Still no Abigail.
Eye squeezed shut under the knit, he drags in another deep breath. Possibly trying to brace himself — or just procrastinating in general. Whatever the case, it doesn't last. He's tired. He hurts.
"I came here to find Abigail."
"Ah ha."
Logan's chin tips up a little at this confirmation, breathing in deep the iron-tainted air only to sigh it out again through his nose. Glances over his shoulder at the wall just behind him, the one that would lead to the prison of the blonde woman in question, even if she's not here at the moment. "Well you did that."
A slim, silver cigarette case is extracted from a pocket, a bone white cigarette taken from that, and the gentle flick of a lighter so that the air can fill with a sweeter-smelling form of smoke, masking the harsher scent of blood that lingers in this room. He doesn't offer one to Deckard, just blows out a stream of smoke and asks, "Is she your friend? Your lover? Or is this some kind of misguided favour to people who give a shit? You didn't strike me as the heroic type, Mr. Deckard."
"Yeah. Well." Deckard's brows tip up over pale blue and sunken in carnage, the pain of which hasn't actually eased off much, if at all. "I thought you were an okay guy." His gravel-shot sentences are staggered behind his thoughts by necessity — a frustration that's enough to tighten the muscles at the back of his jaw without Logan's help. "So I guess there's some merit to that whole thing about books and judging them by their covers."
More breathing. He avoids looking at Logan, long face kept turned down and away. He's really not in a very good position to be smartassed, and dizziness is on its way back again. "It's not a favour. I…dunno." Another pause, and he swallows, one hand raised after the dry lift of his adam's apple against his throat. "It's Abigail."
"Yes it is," Logan says, because he certainly doesn't have a gory hole in his head, and his current position of power means he can be as sarcastic as he likes. "I'm sure we could have gotten along just fine, had not it been for the fact you turned out to be the rat I half-expected you might be. It's a shame, what happens when I put faith in people. That, and your talent for seeing what other people don't." He doesn't know the specifics, but he can put a few things together to get enough of an idea that he doesn't outright ask why Deckard's eyes glow blue.
"Who's Teo?" This question comes abruptly, cheerily, like a verbal pointing of a spotlight, and though Deckard is not looking at him with what remaining capabilities he has, Logan lifts his eyebrows in a quizzical expression.
Deckard's brows hood low, unconsciously rebuked by accusations of rathood. Especially in this context. He was going to do his own thing. Be a little bad, reap he rewards, not worry about whatever collateral damage might come of it. Now this. He's literally such a massive failure that he can't even screw his life up the way he wants to.
"Anyone else…" he tries — stops short. Aborts. Getting defensive about not actually being that scrupulous to a guy that just cut his eye out doesn't make sense. AND YET. The hand at his neck lifts to his face, careful to avoid plugging fingers anywhere that might stir red blood back into a more fervent flow. "She…she seems okay. I didn't come here with intent…" He can't not. Somehow. Logan was so great. Now Deckard's made himself into the bad guy. None of this makes sense.
Oddly miserable for all the wrong reasons, he exhales again and shakes his head a little, still avoiding Logan's gaze, even as the welcome stink of smoke filters in through his clogged sinuses. "Teo's a friend. Mutual friend."
There's no true sympathy, in the way Logan looks at the defeated older man, despair written into his posture and the lines of his face and maybe even more of a presence in the room than the hazy cigarette smoke and the scent of blood and dying life in the room. But still, a frown tugs at his mouth, as if this were complicated. It's easier to believe that Deckard entered this building for the first time in order to spy, deceive, manipulate. But at least this truth makes Logan to be less of a fool - not that it says anything for wrath and consequence, because it all amounts to much of the same.
A fine falling of ash spirals down onto the ground as Logan reaches, flicks dead ash off the end of his cigarette, orange embers glowing. "Oh yeah?" he responds. "He came round here. Asked politely, maybe you should be taking a page out've his book, Mr. Deckard. What's Teo's story?"
Teo's story.
Deckard doesn't react much to the news that he was there. He was already aware. If anything he sighs a little, air escaped in a little rush through nostrils flared against the scent of Logan's cigarette. It's been more than a day since he's had one. Several days, even, but current circumstances make the nearness of nicotine that much more tempting. "He's Italian. Optimistic." Fuzzy headed, too trusting. Deckard works his jaw while he discards certain words from the pile of potentials.
"Used to wear his gun tucked into the back of his pants like Tupac." Little smile there — very slight, almost affectionate in a stupid, kind of annoyed way. "He has a pet bird. I think he's gay."
Deckard isn't watching him, but there's the slight shifting of movement, and yet another flick of a lighter. Then, a cigarette bounces onto the ground, lands at Deckard's feet on concrete, the end of it smoldering away. Little factoids of Teo yield nothing to Logan, no matter how much he tries to read between them, but the courtesy of sharing an addiction is extended. He tries to be good host, in between all the times he's a really bad one.
"And should I be worried?"
It takes effort to get as far as his feet. Deckard has no energy, his back is stiff. He gets there, though, long fingers eventually getting enough of a grip that he can push the unlit end in past lips that have taken on a blue tint that just — really isn't terribly healthy looking. If he had a regular practitioner and they were here they would probably punch him in his good eye, but his first smoky inhalation is one of the deepest he's managed in a while, and it feels nice, so. Whatever.
He takes his time in resettling, smoke furled out of the corner of his mouth in a careless huff to mingle with the haze that's already accumulated. A bottle of whiskey and some morphine and he'd be set. Also dead, but. It sounds nice in theory.
"Probably."
A low chuckle, and a creak of wood as Logan gets up off his perch, feet finding the ground, the click of his cane resettling against it too. "Then I'll be sure to take some precautions," he says, and says this for what purpose is unclear. "So that I won't have to teach your friends the same lesson that I taught you. None of you have the faintest idea who you're fucking with. 'Abigail' is just yet another name to be written into some gravestone somewhere once we're spent of her, and you, my friend - I suspect you won't even be afforded that courtesy."
Logan is moving back towards the door, twisting the metal handle and grinding it open. "Men like us wouldn't."
Deckard's eye rolls up to narrow its focus on Logan for the first time, there. He doesn't actually say anything, but it's a hell of a look to manage with just half of the usual equation. His scruffy jaw hollows beneath caked blood, and the cigarette in his mouth is rolled slowly over from one corner to the other, but some tension in his shoulders is about as far as he gets in the way of getting up and making good on whatever threat the hardened angles of his countenance might insinuate otherwise.
The nuances of body language can be picked up in the last glance over his shoulder, but there's only confidence in the twist of Logan's smile as he steps on out of Deckard's little prison. "Take care of yourself," he says, tone laced with irony, before with a definite thud and metallic click, solid wood is put between him and whatever fate he was tempting.
 February 22nd: I Am Not Interested In Your Profession |
 February 22nd: Making Friends |