05 / 23 / 11 - Jean-Paul, Tom
=XF= 408 |Jean-Paul| - Residences - Chemeketa Military Base
The front door opens into a wide and airy space lit by full-length windows on the far wall. Framed by navy blinds, the California mountains spread lush beyond the glass. Closed doors flank the entryway: behind one, jackets and coats; behind the other, a clean, if spare watercloset. The minimal kitchen sees little use. The counter, rather than serve as prep or dining space, has become collection point for papers and keys. The living area is wide-set with full length windows allowing California sunshine to spill across the thick carpet. The navy furniture is low and angular, but comfortably plush with coordinating tables of pale wood and glass. A crucifix of ash wood hangs on the wall behind the sofa with palm leaves folded about its arms, while a framed print of the deep forest, two large trees prominent, hangs elsewhere.
An alcove just past the kitchen counter opens to two rooms. The spare room is bare but for skis, boots, and a painting. Framed, the abstract work is hung on the wall. Dark and beautiful, hue and shape combine to portray doubt, anger, frustration -- fear. In the main bedroom and bath, black wood forms a sleigh bed frame for crisp sheets and a quilted black comforter. A tall, subtly angled dresser of similar make stands nearby, its top strewn with minutiae: wallet, receipts, rosary, North Star cross pendant and various medals -- alternately, St. Sebastian or St. Joshua. A small, dark crucifix hangs above the dresser with a number of woolen scapulars hanging from it. The bathroom just off the bedroom is similarly monochromatic, spare and neat.
Tom is thoughtful and quiet on his approach through the fourth floor hall after his trek up the stairs on Monday evening, the clink of glass bottles together a soft noise along with the pad of his footsteps over the carpet. He hesitates for a moment, maybe longer, outside Jean-Paul's door before he knocks. He lifts his hand, raps his knuckles a few times on its surface, and draws himself straight. His eye is still bruised purple but good, but otherwise he looks Tom-ordinary, in his dark T-shirt and his blue jeans.
Jean-Paul's expression pulls back sharply from an initial warm welcome to a warier, awkward sort of reserve when he opens the door to find Tom on the side. His swift appraisal surely not failing to note the black eye, he nonetheless merely greets him with an awkward, "Uh, hey."
"Hey," Tom says. His own greeting is not without awkwardness fit enough to share. The bottles clink with the slight shift of his weight. He looks up and over Jean-Paul with a sideways twist of his mouth, and says, "Can I talk to you?" After a beat he adds, "I brought you beer this time. You don't have to take it if you don't want it, though."
Jean-Paul turns his hand inward in a silent invitation. He steps back and to the side, clearing the entry for Tom to come in. It is not immediately apparent what he was up to before the knock. There is no mess of papers in the living room for once.
Tom sidles in after him and toes politely out of his shoes, tightening his grasp a little on the carrier with its bottles in it. Unlike Jamie, he expended the effort to buy better stuff. His tension is apparent, drawn tight in his spine, across his shoulders, in the lingering frown at his brow. His shields are drawn close and tight as well, a reactionary caution rendering them as smooth and solid as long practice can make them. He is quiet at first, despite his stated purpose, but then he clears his throat. He begins with, "I thought about what you said."
Jean-Paul lifts one of the bottles from the carrier and turns it, looking at the label. He keeps turning it and keeps looking at it, so apparently it is fascinating. "And?"
Tom hesitates again, a long breath drawn through his nose. "I'm sorry I violated your privacy, Jean-Paul," he says at length. "I'm sorry for a lot of what I did. That it was in me at all for them to find, maybe." He seems about to say more, but then stops, as though interrupted by his own frown.
Unwinding slightly with Tom's words, Jean-Paul rolls his shoulders back in a shrug. He exhales, taps the bottle, and then cracks one open to pass over to Tom. "I won't say it's okay. It's not. But I forgive you," says SAINT JP. "Why do you hold back now, then?"
Tom smiles at him a little, a hint of irony in the curve of his mouth, maybe in the faint narrowing of his eyes. He says, "Okay," somewhere between relief and a kind of deeper blandness. He is quiet for a moment. He takes the bottle offered him, and looks down at it. "Not sure I get your question," he says. "Jamie was saying some shit like that, like maybe now I've seen it's not so bad to let loose once in awhile. I don't understand how a rational mind could possibly reach that result."
"Maybe not, but surely you can understand how Jamie might." Does Jean-Paul slander his boyfriend? HE DOES. He smiles, more to himself than to Tom, as he is turned away, and then takes a bottle for himself. "I mean -- if you wanted to, if you thought it was okay. What makes it different now? Why was it okay then? What made it okay, what makes it not?"
Tom's little whuff of breath re: Jamie bears some kinship to humor, though it fades quick enough into a more frustrated noise. "I get the sense that you're not really getting--" Tom says, turning the bottle in his hands and then lifting it for a sip. "I didn't think about whether it was okay or not. That part of the thought process was gone. Cleanly enough that I didn't miss it." He rubs his thumb along the neck of the bottle, and paces a few steps deeper into Jean-Paul's room, mostly for the facility of motion. "It wasn't okay then. I just did it anyway, because I wanted to help and I knew best. Mostly."
Moving to take a seat, Jean-Paul gestures Tom into a seat of his own. He takes the chair, with leaves a whole couch. "You know it wasn't okay. You did it. We talked -- we talked about whether it was fair that you had to shield all the time. So, how about that question now?"
Tom sits down and immediately slouches, folding himself back into the back of the couch. He says, "I don't think it is fair that I have to shield all the time. I think it's a pain in the ass. I /also/ think it's less unfair than the alternative. Better to frustrate one telepath than--" He braces his beer bottle against his stomach, rolls his head back against Jean-Paul's couch, and looks at him. "I don't know. Sometimes it bothers me more than other times. Asking me now ... it's not that I'm lying right now. I just can't even conceive of it being worth it. Squandering everything I've worked for out of, what, entitlement?"
"Mm." Jean-Paul studies Tom as he taps his fingers against the neck of his bottle. His tone is particularly flat as he emphasizes -- reemphasizes? -- certain known facts: "I don't like telepathy. I don't make an exception to that with you. I like you, I trusted you because -- there's more to you than that. I have a hard time being comfortable around it."
Tom takes a swallow from his bottle of beer, and then sets it against his face, letting the glass rest cool against his skin. His brow furrows, deep and frownish as he studies Jean-Paul's features for an extended moment in return. He glances away and with the fall of his gaze, he lowers the bottle again, and his throat works in a swallow. He says, "I know."
Jean-Paul is quiet a moment, and then he looks at Tom with a more thoughtful turn to his expression. "Yeah. I guess. Has to bother you, though."
Tom's eyebrows lift and then drop, tip of his head an inclination in Jean-Paul's direction. "It's not just you it bothers me from," he says. "But I can't say I don't understand it. /No one/ on this base has been assaulted by telepathy more than I have. With the possibly exception of Jamie who is a magnet for fucking everything." Madrox: always the exception to every rule. "The only people who aren't afraid of telepaths are the ones who aren't thinking about what we can do." He looks away again, and the last thing he says sounds awfully bitter: "The only way to earn trust is to be trustworthy."
Jean-Paul's easy, rapid, "Yeah, it is," doesn't particularly help Tom's bitterness, now does it? Or maybe it does. WHO KNOWS. "Do you think it's wrong to listen, or do you just -- not think it's worth it?"
Tom rubs at his eyebrow with one thumb and frowns a little more deeply. "I don't know," he says. "It's wrong if it hurts people. If I'm just doing it because I can, or because I want to know a secret. I don't think it's inherently wrong, though." He makes a face at Jean-Paul. Maturely. "I mean, you know I fucking default to hearing, right? Do I look like Rutledge to you?"
"So? I default to seeing but I don't go around peeking in every window," Jean-Paul says, like it's so the same. The Rutledge comparison draws no comprehension. He just looks a little baffled.
"No, but if somebody is walking around naked in their apartment with the blinds open when you fly past, that doesn't make you a pervert," Tom retorts. "Telepathy isn't wrong. Abusing it is."
"Listening in on someone without their knowledge is an abuse," Jean-Paul says. His words carry an edge of heat.
"Yeah," Tom says, exasperation in his voice matched by the thinning of his lips. He rubs at one of his eyes with a fingertip. "But I think you of all people know how easy it is for that to happen by accident."
Jean-Paul goes, "Mmph." He does not entirely deny this point. "But you are not uncontrolled."
"No," Tom answers. He ducks his head, then, and then lifts his bottle for a longer swallow of its contents, making a slight face as he blows his next breath past his nose. "I'm not."
Jean-Paul circles back around and repeats, "Wrong if it hurts people. If you're doing it because you can. But if you are doing it because it /might help/...." He starts quiet, but his words end a little nasty.
Tom looks back at him with a sharper narrowing of his eyes. "It's not helping," he says, "if it overrides your choices. Help is when you ask. You know who thought she would /help/ me? Whether I /liked/ it or not? Help me, change me, remake me -- You think I don't know that? Jean-Paul, I owned these actions because they were mine. They were wrong actions. Some of them were downright /ugly/." He draws a breath and demands with a rising intensity in his voice, sitting straight and fierce-eyed as he glares across the brief distance between them: "But give me the choices I've always made. Don't forget everything I've ever said or done because of what a couple of fucking telepaths just did to me. You say you can't let this go because it's not okay, fine. Don't let everything /else/ go either."
Jean-Paul again goes, "Mmph." He sits back, even slouching a little, and turns the bottle of beer now resting on his thigh. He has probably sipped it a few times. "All right. Maybe that was unfair."
"Yeah," Tom says. He rubs at his face with his free hand, and winces as he accidentally scrubs, you know, bruised flesh. He jerks his hand away and makes a cranky noise. Then he says, tone more even, if quiet: "You know, I remembered worse nastiness than anything I've done in the past few weeks, and you were one of the people I believed when you told me it's who I am now that matters."
Gaze tracking again to Tom's eye, Jean-Paul just barely resists asking with the distraction of what he says. "Ah. Yes." He reroutes. "It is."
Tom takes a sip from his beer bottle and looks down into it. His frown lingers, but for a long moment, he is quiet.
Jean-Paul, equally quiet, nurses his beer.
Tom cradles his bottle between his hands. He looks up at him again finally, and says, "You were right, by the way. Isabel thinks you were being a jerk."
Jean-Paul snorts. "So does Jamie. Maybe not in so many words." He just looks the more stubborn for it.
Tom smiles as though despite himself, and rubs the pad of his thumb along the curve of one thick, dark eyebrow. He says, "It's not really possible to be really upset about being held accountable for actions you wouldn't have chosen when you're talking to Jamie Madrox."
Jean-Paul looks a little cranky, but at least he aims the crank elsewhere: "Isabel is unfair to him."
"Yeah," Tom agrees. He turns his beer bottle in his hands. "She really hates his mutation."
Jean-Paul makes a sort of disgruntled noise. "I think he was afraid that you and I--." He gestures. Then he gestures elsewhere. "It would be like that."
Tom looks up and over at Jean-Paul with upswept brows. He hesitates maybe a beat too long before he ducks his head. "Well," he says, "to be fair, I don't usually say dumb things to you at the /rate/ that he... you know."
Jean-Paul just sighs. It is an 'Oh, Jamie' sort of sigh. Tom has surely heard it, felt it, breathed it himself.
Ghost of a smile warming Tom's expression, he studies the mouth of his bottle for a moment before he lifts it to his lips again. Then he says, quieter, "You're still my friend. Even if you are kind of a jerk sometimes."
Jean-Paul looks almost amused, but then it shutters into something flatly ... non-humorous. "Maybe. But I'm not wrong."
Tom starts to look irritated, and then he stops. He takes a long swallow from the bottle of his beer, and then draws himself up, climbing up from Jean-Paul's couch. He draws a long breath through his nose, studying Jean-Paul's features as he lowers the beer to dangle in the loose clasp of his fingers at his hip. Thoughtful for that extended moment, what he chooses to say finally is only, "Good night, Pan."
For a moment, a look of almost hurt touches Jean-Paul's expression before an answering irritation swallows it before being tamped flat. He says, "Night, Tink," and remains seated.
Tom pauses a moment longer, a hint of puzzlement touching his face, but since he is shielding, he is fairly resigned to not really having that much of a clue what is going on in Jean-Paul's head. So he tips his head in a kind of nod, and then turns and pads across the room to go find his shoes.
Jean-Paul picks at the label of his beer bottle. He does not help Tom with his shoes. Eventually, once he's left, he goes to put the other bottles away.
Part one of ruining JP's night.