OOC: Log! Rossi is broken again.
> (Rossi)'>
X-Men: Movieverse 3 - Friday, July 13, 2007, 12:16 AM
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=NYC= Apt 115 |Rossi| - Concord Apartments - Apartments in the Sky
An ancient, faded elegance sketches the boundaries of this apartment, hinted at in crown molding and worn, faded floors. High walls span to high ceilings, pale yellow with the barest of white trim; at one end, three high windows gape to let in day's light or night's dark with equal indifference. A small kitchen pocks a hollow in one wall, a doorless entry that offers glimpses of an metal-framed refrigerator and a cabinet-hung microwave. On the other side of the small living room, a short hallway offers entrances to bathroom and bedroom, both doors battered with the wear and tear of age.
In the living room are the basic accoutrements of comfort: sofas, chairs, table, television. Spartan accessories, betraying little of the owner; that task is left for the walls, hung with pictures of family and friends. Through them all runs the thread of blue, NYPD's uniform tailored to pride and vigor.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias Rossi to watch here.]
[Exits : [O]ut]
[Players : Rossi ]
The vulture is gone, flown off as vultures inevitably do. The carcass remains. He sits cross-legged in his sofa in NYPD sweat pants and Rumpelstiltskin hair, feet safely tucked under his knees, green eyes barely visible behind a fan of thick, effeminate lashes. A mosquito engages to suck something from his bared forearm. He watches it without interest.
The television blares something obtrusive about mattresses and a sale to end all sales. Chris does not move.
There is yet movement in the apartment, as one replacement vulture flaps about the kitchen, doing something with a pair of small dishes and spoons to match. Eventually, the movement emerges, and resolves itself in the form of one Jean Grey, neat and casual and visiting friend in bare feet, capri jeans, and a cream coloured top with small blue flowers embroidered upon it. "Mango sorbet," she pronounces. "When Ororo was in the hospital after Toad strangled -her-, we brought her ice cream. Good for the throat."
The detective opens his eyes just far enough to glance askance at Jean. His head does not turn; the dull buzz of pain and depression that hisses through his mind supplies the reason why. He is a battered specimen, even in profile: the long throat is striped with dark purple; the long curve of a cut arcs over his brow and into his cheekbone. The scabbed hand on one knee folds. << When'd that happen? >>
The little dish of mango sorbet is extended, Jean taking the time and effort to do it physically, despite the chill rapidly leaving the ceramic to bleed into her fingertips and slick them with condensation. "Shit," she muses, languge as informal as her dress. "It was... hah, just a little under a year ago."
<< I remember her being in the hospital, >> Chris admits slowly, distraction offered by the task of picking through faded memories. He nudges it slowly out of the recesses of his mind, tugging the far too familiar scent of hospital life out of clearer, more recent encounters. He straightens a little in his seat, rousing slowly out of lethargy. << Seems like a long time ago. >>
"If you guys start up some freaky-ass tradition of anniversary stranglings, I'm going to have -words- with you," Jean informs, mock severity a cover for real, if quiet, concern as she leans back on her heels, the better to hold the position of sorbet supplicant. Quietly, she reflects that "He really worked you over, didn't he?"
The question prompts the barest of shrugs, a twitch of shoulders that ends in his lapse back into physical torpor. Chris sinks his head back against the sofa cushions, risking the stretch of throat that digs phantom fingers into muscles bruised deep, and watches the ceiling. << He wasn't the same guy. >> /Same guy/ echoes under the words, acrid with the taint of remembered terror.
Mind sends and mind receives, the nuances of emotion and the flickers of image and sensation driving Jean to lift her free hand to her throat and press gently, half aware of the movement and pairing it with a slight shiver. "I don't want to press you," she murmurs, carefully aloud, carefully keeping her mind on her own side of the fence. "But... could you show me?"
Chris stares blankly at the ceiling, but his mind complies, peeling away the haze of past hours (days) to the short, disastrous encounter in the park. The broad frame, so familiar but so different. The cold flash of blue eyes; the abrupt realization, unwisely blurted out. Then violence, sickening, jerking wariness too late out of an unconscious complacency all the more nauseating for its discovery.
He flattens his hand on his thighs, peripherally recognizing the shiver of muscles for what it is.
Spoon clatters against bowl, and both tumble for the floor as the waves of unbridled violence spool forth. Caught with an unconscious flare of her eyes, gone almost before it's seen, they hover, as Jean shakes her head and seems to forget the sorbet was ever there. "My god," she murmurs. "He... It..." And then her mouth closes with a snap, as she visibly shakes herself, picks up the hovering sorbet, and offers it anew, as distraction for both of them. "The double, it's like he sees you as just another human. Just another ant. Ours..." A hand lifts and opens. "Ours still has the capacity to pick out specific non-mutants as something he'd rather have alive. You, Moira MacTaggart..." She trails off.
<< I forgot, >> Chris says, self-recrimination curling into itself with jagged spikes. Contempt oozes from punctures in the thought. He wakes just enough to uncross his legs, pressing his heels into the edge of the table. << Son of a bitch won me over. Stealing my whiskey, bringing me champagne on New Year's -- I forgot he really is. >> A vagrant wisp of thought completes wearily: << I am such a fucking idiot. >>
"Terrorists are people too," Jean reflects, at last giving up on Chris taking his mango-flavoured medicine and taking a seat near him insteas to eat it herself. "They wouldn't be so terrifying if they weren't. Join the idiot club, if you are one."
Chris rolls his head to regard Jean, his gaze solemn. << I'm always so fucking depressing after this shit, >> he announces, sliding his foot off the edge of the table to tuck it under instead. His head rolls back: ceiling again. << If you feel like injecting me with Prozac or something, feel free. >>
"Hey, I -tried-, but you reject my all-natural frozen organic mood-enhancer," Jean points out, with a lift of the sorbet spoon. The second dish, abandoned, rests on the table by Rossi's foor. "But in all seriousness, if you were sunshine and roses after coming close to your own mortality," (Kindly, Jean only thinks the 'again'.) "I'd be more worried."
He stares at the ceiling. The ceiling stares back. It has very little in the way of input. << I drive Ororo crazy. >> There's a suggestion of a grin in that, the ghost of amusement that falls somewhat flat. << I really was going to get the hell out of there. >>
"As I recall," Jean muses, wriggling bare toes as shards of mango-flavoured delight escape briefly from behind mental walls to colour her side of the light link tossed out between them, "Ororo ended up with Toad wanting a rematch because she just -had- to have the last word at Liberty Island. She'll probably kill me if I share what it was," she muses still more, not notably put off by this thought.
Chris's mouth twitches. The lower lip is split, and scabbed over; he reaches to touch it experimentally with the back of his wrist, and finds no signs of bleeding. << I never get the last word, >> he says ruefully. Not, the sentiment curdles underneath, that he doesn't /try/. Mutants. << What was it? >>
"In that particular fight, I spent most of it out of the action because Toad horked up a ball of spit in my face and nearly suffocated me until Scott was able to shatter it. -Not- exactly my finest moment," Jean reflects, with a good seasoning of rue, before she gives Chris a grin, sidelong, and intones, in her best impression of Storm, Goddess of Nature, "Do you know what happens to a Toad when it's hit by lightning?" She pauses, tags in an "Insert a massive lightning bolt here, and Toad getting knocked out the window," in her own voice, and then continues. "The same thing that happens to everything else."
He says nothing for a moment, contemplating that image, then quivers. It is a soundless laugh, pushed out of the morass of discomfort and apathy, but it is amusement nonetheless: one that prompts a flinch, a mouthed curse, and a cautious press of fingers into eyehollows. << Christ. She has a /stupid/ sense of humor. >> Affection stirs and skates under the thought. << Where the hell does she come up with that shit? >>
Jean gives voice to the laugh where abused vocal chords fail, a comfortable chuckle at a well-beloved friend's foibles. "I have no idea... but I think we may have to start having snappy repartee training sessions."
<< Never sank that low, >> Chris states for the record, letting his tickled amusement drag a spinneret of mood out after it. He presses back on the sofa to sit up, interest drifting down towards the sherbet on the table. He cranes forward to reach it. << You should get her a better script. >>
"I'm not sure who we'd get to write it," Jean reflects. "I come up with some stinkers myself, on occasion. Scott... doesn't quip. And Logans generally involve creative uses of someone's spleen. Maybe we should pick your brain. You never fail to get a reaction after all."
Chris retreats to his side of the sofa, sherbet cradled against his stomach. His brows lower over a careful application of spoon to frozen food. << I piss people off. >> It is a simple statement of fact. << It's what I do. Never trust a guy you can't piss off. >>
"Lets you know where their buttons are?" Jean wonders, with a cock of her head and a look of somewhat avian interest from above a spoonful of sorbet. "Or just lets you know they're people?"
The glance Chris sends towards Jean is quizzical. He does not need to speak his 'duh.' Mango sherbet. He takes a wary spoonful and thinks about swallowing. Chickenshit.
"I can't remember," Jean muses. "Have you managed to piss me off before?"
Chris considers Jean. He swallows at last, though the sherbet is mostly melted anyway. << Yeah. Probably. >>
"Well," Jean reflects, with a briefly watchful look as Chris swallows, shoulders set in advance of any empathically-shared pain. "That's good. And vaguely related to trust, if we manage to get a hold of a Magneto, do you government types have a safe place to hold him again?"
He has nothing to say to that. Chris takes in another spoonful of sherbet and swallows; this one goes down somewhat easier than before, cause for celebration. He touches his nose with the bowl of his utensil. << Heard the Feds have been working on something. >>
"I'll go rattle our contacts with sticks, then... and if I get anything actually interesting, I'll let you kow." Jean promises, before a rustling sound suggests another vulture is on its way.
Chris closes his eyes. Sherbet. He replaces his spoon in the bowl and sets his feet on the ground to stand. Avoidance crimps his mood; he mind subsides back into dreary unease. << ...going to my room.... >> he thinks. And does.
"Rest easy," Jean calls back, before finding where her shoes have escaped to, and taking her leave. The vulture clocking in is given pressing instructions regarding sorbet.
Love shouldn't hurt, Rossi. Love shouldn't hurt.
X-Men: Movieverse 3 - Friday, July 13, 2007, 12:16 AM
-----------------------------------------------------
=NYC= Apt 115 |Rossi| - Concord Apartments - Apartments in the Sky
An ancient, faded elegance sketches the boundaries of this apartment, hinted at in crown molding and worn, faded floors. High walls span to high ceilings, pale yellow with the barest of white trim; at one end, three high windows gape to let in day's light or night's dark with equal indifference. A small kitchen pocks a hollow in one wall, a doorless entry that offers glimpses of an metal-framed refrigerator and a cabinet-hung microwave. On the other side of the small living room, a short hallway offers entrances to bathroom and bedroom, both doors battered with the wear and tear of age.
In the living room are the basic accoutrements of comfort: sofas, chairs, table, television. Spartan accessories, betraying little of the owner; that task is left for the walls, hung with pictures of family and friends. Through them all runs the thread of blue, NYPD's uniform tailored to pride and vigor.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias Rossi to watch here.]
[Exits : [O]ut]
[Players : Rossi ]
The vulture is gone, flown off as vultures inevitably do. The carcass remains. He sits cross-legged in his sofa in NYPD sweat pants and Rumpelstiltskin hair, feet safely tucked under his knees, green eyes barely visible behind a fan of thick, effeminate lashes. A mosquito engages to suck something from his bared forearm. He watches it without interest.
The television blares something obtrusive about mattresses and a sale to end all sales. Chris does not move.
There is yet movement in the apartment, as one replacement vulture flaps about the kitchen, doing something with a pair of small dishes and spoons to match. Eventually, the movement emerges, and resolves itself in the form of one Jean Grey, neat and casual and visiting friend in bare feet, capri jeans, and a cream coloured top with small blue flowers embroidered upon it. "Mango sorbet," she pronounces. "When Ororo was in the hospital after Toad strangled -her-, we brought her ice cream. Good for the throat."
The detective opens his eyes just far enough to glance askance at Jean. His head does not turn; the dull buzz of pain and depression that hisses through his mind supplies the reason why. He is a battered specimen, even in profile: the long throat is striped with dark purple; the long curve of a cut arcs over his brow and into his cheekbone. The scabbed hand on one knee folds. << When'd that happen? >>
The little dish of mango sorbet is extended, Jean taking the time and effort to do it physically, despite the chill rapidly leaving the ceramic to bleed into her fingertips and slick them with condensation. "Shit," she muses, languge as informal as her dress. "It was... hah, just a little under a year ago."
<< I remember her being in the hospital, >> Chris admits slowly, distraction offered by the task of picking through faded memories. He nudges it slowly out of the recesses of his mind, tugging the far too familiar scent of hospital life out of clearer, more recent encounters. He straightens a little in his seat, rousing slowly out of lethargy. << Seems like a long time ago. >>
"If you guys start up some freaky-ass tradition of anniversary stranglings, I'm going to have -words- with you," Jean informs, mock severity a cover for real, if quiet, concern as she leans back on her heels, the better to hold the position of sorbet supplicant. Quietly, she reflects that "He really worked you over, didn't he?"
The question prompts the barest of shrugs, a twitch of shoulders that ends in his lapse back into physical torpor. Chris sinks his head back against the sofa cushions, risking the stretch of throat that digs phantom fingers into muscles bruised deep, and watches the ceiling. << He wasn't the same guy. >> /Same guy/ echoes under the words, acrid with the taint of remembered terror.
Mind sends and mind receives, the nuances of emotion and the flickers of image and sensation driving Jean to lift her free hand to her throat and press gently, half aware of the movement and pairing it with a slight shiver. "I don't want to press you," she murmurs, carefully aloud, carefully keeping her mind on her own side of the fence. "But... could you show me?"
Chris stares blankly at the ceiling, but his mind complies, peeling away the haze of past hours (days) to the short, disastrous encounter in the park. The broad frame, so familiar but so different. The cold flash of blue eyes; the abrupt realization, unwisely blurted out. Then violence, sickening, jerking wariness too late out of an unconscious complacency all the more nauseating for its discovery.
He flattens his hand on his thighs, peripherally recognizing the shiver of muscles for what it is.
Spoon clatters against bowl, and both tumble for the floor as the waves of unbridled violence spool forth. Caught with an unconscious flare of her eyes, gone almost before it's seen, they hover, as Jean shakes her head and seems to forget the sorbet was ever there. "My god," she murmurs. "He... It..." And then her mouth closes with a snap, as she visibly shakes herself, picks up the hovering sorbet, and offers it anew, as distraction for both of them. "The double, it's like he sees you as just another human. Just another ant. Ours..." A hand lifts and opens. "Ours still has the capacity to pick out specific non-mutants as something he'd rather have alive. You, Moira MacTaggart..." She trails off.
<< I forgot, >> Chris says, self-recrimination curling into itself with jagged spikes. Contempt oozes from punctures in the thought. He wakes just enough to uncross his legs, pressing his heels into the edge of the table. << Son of a bitch won me over. Stealing my whiskey, bringing me champagne on New Year's -- I forgot he really is. >> A vagrant wisp of thought completes wearily: << I am such a fucking idiot. >>
"Terrorists are people too," Jean reflects, at last giving up on Chris taking his mango-flavoured medicine and taking a seat near him insteas to eat it herself. "They wouldn't be so terrifying if they weren't. Join the idiot club, if you are one."
Chris rolls his head to regard Jean, his gaze solemn. << I'm always so fucking depressing after this shit, >> he announces, sliding his foot off the edge of the table to tuck it under instead. His head rolls back: ceiling again. << If you feel like injecting me with Prozac or something, feel free. >>
"Hey, I -tried-, but you reject my all-natural frozen organic mood-enhancer," Jean points out, with a lift of the sorbet spoon. The second dish, abandoned, rests on the table by Rossi's foor. "But in all seriousness, if you were sunshine and roses after coming close to your own mortality," (Kindly, Jean only thinks the 'again'.) "I'd be more worried."
He stares at the ceiling. The ceiling stares back. It has very little in the way of input. << I drive Ororo crazy. >> There's a suggestion of a grin in that, the ghost of amusement that falls somewhat flat. << I really was going to get the hell out of there. >>
"As I recall," Jean muses, wriggling bare toes as shards of mango-flavoured delight escape briefly from behind mental walls to colour her side of the light link tossed out between them, "Ororo ended up with Toad wanting a rematch because she just -had- to have the last word at Liberty Island. She'll probably kill me if I share what it was," she muses still more, not notably put off by this thought.
Chris's mouth twitches. The lower lip is split, and scabbed over; he reaches to touch it experimentally with the back of his wrist, and finds no signs of bleeding. << I never get the last word, >> he says ruefully. Not, the sentiment curdles underneath, that he doesn't /try/. Mutants. << What was it? >>
"In that particular fight, I spent most of it out of the action because Toad horked up a ball of spit in my face and nearly suffocated me until Scott was able to shatter it. -Not- exactly my finest moment," Jean reflects, with a good seasoning of rue, before she gives Chris a grin, sidelong, and intones, in her best impression of Storm, Goddess of Nature, "Do you know what happens to a Toad when it's hit by lightning?" She pauses, tags in an "Insert a massive lightning bolt here, and Toad getting knocked out the window," in her own voice, and then continues. "The same thing that happens to everything else."
He says nothing for a moment, contemplating that image, then quivers. It is a soundless laugh, pushed out of the morass of discomfort and apathy, but it is amusement nonetheless: one that prompts a flinch, a mouthed curse, and a cautious press of fingers into eyehollows. << Christ. She has a /stupid/ sense of humor. >> Affection stirs and skates under the thought. << Where the hell does she come up with that shit? >>
Jean gives voice to the laugh where abused vocal chords fail, a comfortable chuckle at a well-beloved friend's foibles. "I have no idea... but I think we may have to start having snappy repartee training sessions."
<< Never sank that low, >> Chris states for the record, letting his tickled amusement drag a spinneret of mood out after it. He presses back on the sofa to sit up, interest drifting down towards the sherbet on the table. He cranes forward to reach it. << You should get her a better script. >>
"I'm not sure who we'd get to write it," Jean reflects. "I come up with some stinkers myself, on occasion. Scott... doesn't quip. And Logans generally involve creative uses of someone's spleen. Maybe we should pick your brain. You never fail to get a reaction after all."
Chris retreats to his side of the sofa, sherbet cradled against his stomach. His brows lower over a careful application of spoon to frozen food. << I piss people off. >> It is a simple statement of fact. << It's what I do. Never trust a guy you can't piss off. >>
"Lets you know where their buttons are?" Jean wonders, with a cock of her head and a look of somewhat avian interest from above a spoonful of sorbet. "Or just lets you know they're people?"
The glance Chris sends towards Jean is quizzical. He does not need to speak his 'duh.' Mango sherbet. He takes a wary spoonful and thinks about swallowing. Chickenshit.
"I can't remember," Jean muses. "Have you managed to piss me off before?"
Chris considers Jean. He swallows at last, though the sherbet is mostly melted anyway. << Yeah. Probably. >>
"Well," Jean reflects, with a briefly watchful look as Chris swallows, shoulders set in advance of any empathically-shared pain. "That's good. And vaguely related to trust, if we manage to get a hold of a Magneto, do you government types have a safe place to hold him again?"
He has nothing to say to that. Chris takes in another spoonful of sherbet and swallows; this one goes down somewhat easier than before, cause for celebration. He touches his nose with the bowl of his utensil. << Heard the Feds have been working on something. >>
"I'll go rattle our contacts with sticks, then... and if I get anything actually interesting, I'll let you kow." Jean promises, before a rustling sound suggests another vulture is on its way.
Chris closes his eyes. Sherbet. He replaces his spoon in the bowl and sets his feet on the ground to stand. Avoidance crimps his mood; he mind subsides back into dreary unease. << ...going to my room.... >> he thinks. And does.
"Rest easy," Jean calls back, before finding where her shoes have escaped to, and taking her leave. The vulture clocking in is given pressing instructions regarding sorbet.
Love shouldn't hurt, Rossi. Love shouldn't hurt.