OOC: commentary on Leah/Rossi FoH argument scene
LJ entry: Terriers and poodles
Originally posted: November 20, 2005
Written: November 30, 2005
What Has Come Before: The Friends of Humanity kidnapped John Grey and then got their Purity asses blowed up real good at the Brotherhood-crashed rally. A few days before that, Leah's FoH minder, Nathan, brought her to Tom, who brought her to Dr. Grey for an interview, which she published in the New York Times to some media and political kerfuffle. Regular folks read it, too, including members of the NYPD, and some of them would dearly like to know how Ms. Canto is connected to the Grey kidnapping and to the Friends.
We players figured we'd have this scene because, yeah, Rossi needs to yell at Leah. I think that's about as detailed as our planning went (and most of the time, we don't even go that far, just show up and wait for magic to happen). I enjoyed the scene, had fun with it, had fun with Rossi's player . . . but I'm a little unhappy with how I've been handling Leah's job. I feel like I need to make more postings, to her LJ and to the IC News bboard, for proper presentation of what she's doing. It's one thing for me to say, "She's a well-known political reporter and commentator," but another to actually show that. Evidence. Proof. I will try to do better there!
But the scene itself was good. I'm just cranky about my failings as a player. As always.
Sunday: God's day. In Chris Rossi parlance, a different matter altogether, fallen hard and fast from the Church's grace and bidding fair to plummet farther. Temper in abeyance, a newspaper's front page rolled for smiting purpose in a hand, he ambles up the hallway to Leah Canto's apartment, girded in righteous judgment and -- for modesty's sake -- jeans and a T-shirt. A fist knocks doom upon the door. Thump. Thump. "Police. Open up." Thump.
Poooooleeeeece! I'm a lazy ass; I made him set. I adore the fancy writing. I'm too lazy to match it. Rossi's player reads better books than I do, I think. That's the key. It's nice of the char to have dressed before coming upstairs. Very thoughtful.
...Thump. A softer one: a pillow, pushed off Leah's bed with her convulsive reentry into consciousness. Blearily she blinks towards the door, then at the clock, and then at the pillow (why not). "I'll kill him," she mumbles and drags herself out of bed and into a fuzzy, ratty blue terrycloth robe. Goes to the door. Opens it. Announces, "I'll kill you."
Should've gone back to the last time I used the robe to see if it's the same color, but eh. We'll say she has many robes (as I do for Shaw, for the same reason: lazy!). I believe Leah did go to church, but the early service, and now she's trying to catch up on sleep afterwards because that's what you do on Sunday (speaking from experience). She does sleep in the nude. All my chars do because I do and, once again, I'm lazy: I write what I know! So, robe. I also wanted to play her a little humorously to counterpoint the Sturm und Drang I knew was coming up. It's all about striking those different notes, to make each of them clearer and more powerful.
"Threatening bodily harm to a cop," mocks Rossi, pushing his way past Leah with peremptory assurance. "That'll look good on your record. We do a mug shot, you should wear that outfit. The blue sets off your teeth. --What the fuck, Canto. The /Friends/?"
Leah peers into the empty hallway for a suspended moment. Thought finally kicks in, kicks /her,/ and she shuts the door and turns around. "Huh?"
Too many words. Flying at her. She's barely registering it's him, let alone that he's talking. Thought processes moving sluggishly. God, I have been there: staring out the door, holding it open, perfectly blank in the head and contentedly so. Could've stood there all day. Again, writing what I know. Lazy, lazy. But funny!
The newspaper slaps to the coffee table, showing an irrelevant byline; a frown skips across to Leah, measures her, then moves on to the kitchen. "You got coffee? Let me make you some coffee. Then we can have a little talk about you and some of your new associates. How's that?"
Leah blinks. "I don't have a record."
Rossi's player started beating me for making him laugh. Trying to play angry here! No laughing! I don't play Leah's light side enough, so stuff it. It's funny. I'm funny. I'm fucking hilarious. He's in full-on detective mode, and Leah's still halfway in bed. She doesn't have a record, though; she's right about that. Never got busted for anything, not even the heroin in college. Good girl!
"You will if you keep this shit up," pitches the drawl of baritone from the kitchen. Cabinets slam; water sluices into the coffeemaker's carafe. "Go wash your face. Get find wherever it is you've been keeping your brain and stick it back in your head. Kidnapping, Canto. Not to mention association with a terrorist organization. What do you think you are, Barney? Think you'll squirm out of it with great big purple charm?"
Barney. Kyrie eleison. Stop making me laugh!
"I'm not purple!" protests Leah on her wander back into the living room. Her hands hang loose and heavy in the robe's pockets, and she stares at him. "Barney? I just wrote a thing. Got me a lot of money. And press. Did you see me on TV?"
I hear that last sentence pitched in something of a schoolgirl's eager wistfulness: Didja see me? Huh? Was I good? Didja like it? Was I pretty? She cares what people think about her work. She's proud of it. She's proud of herself. But she does want the validation, and she cares more about his opinion, in particular, than she'd really like to. Dammit. She mentions the money first. I guess that matters more to her (in sleepiness veritas!). The press is nice, too, though. Again, I need to do a better job of describing her job: the kind of notice she gets, the minutiae of her job, her routines, and so on. I do it for Shaw, right? So I should do it for her. I will. I swear.
A green eye caps itself with black, and squints at Leah across the breakfast counter. "I had a date with a corpse. And then MA. You been reading the news, Canto? Miller came back. Woman's like a bad fart in a closed room. --Go wash your face."
Leah marvels, "Is my /face/ purple?"
Rossi's player really did not want me making him laugh so much. Ahem. He does a lot of color posing, more even than I do; I feel like I have to keep up, but I usually don't. Leah has browny-bronze hair and pale skin and pale-brown eyes. There. Fine. Rossi's better looking, anyway; let's describe him more! I don't know that Leah cares about Sabella's second death that much: it's weird, but it's mutants, and that shit happens, apparently. She's also still trying to wake up and figure out what the bleeding fuck is going on here.
"Yes." The sink shuts off with a squeak. Rossi turns away to busy himself with the coffee maker. "Now go wake up."
That player's so much better than I with details in scenes, especially with inanimate objects. He has a bond with inanimate objects that approaches the spiritual. I view them more as stage props, from my theatre background. I steal from him. All the time.
"Shit," Leah mutters and goes into the bathrooom. Tap on (hiss). Tap off (shush). She reemerges with her face scrubbed and beads of water outlining her sleep-soft features like translucent bangles. Patting absently at cheeks and brow to mop them up, she leans over the counter and studies him from there. "You're mad. At me."
See? Stealing. Rossi's player poses something; I copy it in my reply. And thus chemistry is built, trading back and forth like happy little ions. I've been talking with a couple people about chemistry - what it is, how you build it - and I do think give-and-take is a huge part of it: where you can build on each other's work with call-backs and elaborations, where you trust each other to push boundaries as far and in whatever directions they need to go, where you develop each other's character at the same time you're developing your own. I know chemistry from stage-acting, when you can certainly feel it with fellow actors, and it's much the same, for me, online. I feel the bonds (and the absence of them, there's that, too). Trust, reliance, collaboration, joy. And this player and I have had more than a decade to put that into practice, so yeah, plenty of chemistry here.
Back to the scene: Leah's awake, and she knows pretty well why he's here, but she's gonna see what she can suss out before they really get into it. She craves their drama, their anger, their passion. Addictive habit. Goes hand-in-hand with her lust for politics and journalism, for idealism, for drinking and drugging and churching and sexing. Like many people, she has many holes in her soul that she tries to fill. The FoH business is stretching her out more, tattering her, drawing the holes larger, so she's acting out more, seeking more. There are all kinds of ways to be a junkie. It's all brain chemistry, you know, in the end, and Rossi is a helluva drug.
Hips settled against the back counter, already perfumed by the first seductive, draft-borne scents of brewing coffee, Chris folds his arms across his chest and cants his head at Leah. "Mad," he echoes, mellowly enough."Why should I be mad? Turns out you associate with the Friends of Humanity. You were a knowing participant in a kidnapping. You /interviewed/ -- shit, Canto. You /know/ Professor Grey."
Cautiously Leah allows, "I've met him before. Am I under arrest, Detective? Do I call my lawyer?"
I love the smell of coffee. Can't stand to drink it (too bitter), but oh, that smell. Little panic alarms are flaring in Leah's head right now because she was an ex post facto participant, kinda, and she has more than a passing familiarity with the law, because of her early years as a reporter (working the metro beat, covering cases, investigating some) and her cop family. She's asking him as a possible suspect, then: is it Miranda time?
"I'm thinking about it," Rossi bites back, the first hint of temper stabbing through his voice. "What the fuck, Leah? Are you completely nuts?"
And he pings back with first-name intimacy. Oh, she suspects that. She does. Word games. Playing good cop on her? Leah's become suspicious of everything in her life. Everyone. I haven't written much about her NPC friends because she honestly has withdrawn from them, as she has her family (well, and there was that whole Thanksgiving Day disaster with them, too). The FoH have isolated her - or, more properly, she's isolated herself because of what she thinks she should do. She really is half-following a movie script in her head, for What You Do When Being Extorted By Bad Guys. Most of the time she knows she's aping Hollywood, but she's at a loss for what else to do. She doesn't have much framework for this terrible mess, so movies and TV it is! And she knows that's dumb, and she's embarrassed, but goddamn. What else is there? Witness protection? Yeah, right. She's seen those movies, too, thanks.
"No," and Leah slouches lower over the counter, supported on pushed-apart elbows and pushed-back feet. She picks at a chip in the Formica with her thumbnail. "I'm not nuts," she says bitterly. "I'm just doing my job, and fuck you, Rossi. You wanna drag me in to talk to the Feds or whoever about Dr. Grey, you go ahead, but--" hot pale eyes snap up at him, and her mouth is an ugly, squashed pink worm "--you can get the fuck out of my apartment otherwise."
So. She's embarrassed, scared, defensive, backed into a corner by herself more than by anyone or anything else - so she lashes out. Because that is what Leah Cantos do. I apologize to people a lot for her. I suppose I shouldn't: conflict and mean, pissy, shallow humanity are good in rp, right? IC/OOC again. I fear that if I keep playing her like this, no one will want to play with me on any of my alts because OMG what a drama queen and a bitch, just look at her characters! (Shaw also being a drama queen and a bitch when it suits him.) So I have self-esteem issues. I'm a member of the club; I have a jacket and everything. Still and all, dammit, it is human, and I do like her mean pissiness. Her terrible weakness inside her strength. Her fatal stubbornness. She just can't give in, even when she should. It's going to kill her. Rossi's player liked the "worm" thing. I've used it before, but hey, positive reinforcement! I'll keep using it.
"I'm making you coffee," the man informs with wild, sweet menace. Kindness. Between friends. He unfolds, leaning to brace his own arms wide against the sink's edge, sympathy carved deep on the hard face. "Everyone needs coffee to start out a productive day of black, malevolent evil-doing. It's the American way. Coffee, morning paper, then chaos."
That "wild, sweet menace" is awesome beyond the telling of it. I want to bend him over the counter myself, and I have, like, zero sex drive. Just an all-around great pose. This player is also addictive.
Leah jerks away from the counter. "Asshole," she snarls and stalks away, fists tight at her sides.
The kitchen breathes in. Exhales coffee. Wonders, nicely, "Want some toast?"
Anthropomorphizing! Props, people, mad props.
"I want," Leah grits through her teeth, "to kill you, as I said. Get out of here, Rossi. Go."
I was also apologizing a lot in this scene, even if only in my head, because she really did want him gone, and that would've been the end of the scene, and I would've been sad. He's interrogating her. She knows that. And part of her wants it. Desperately, fervently, like a dehydrated woman in the desert offered a glass of acid rain. She so much wants to scourge and flagellate herself, be punished for bad girl such a bad bad girl that she's gone back to the Catholic Church she grew to hate in her teens and left in her early twenties (although you never really leave the Catholic Church, hm?) and she'd love for him to just put her on a rack, literal or figurative, and crank all her sins out of her. Terrible, terrifying release; she'd expire from the black and bleeding joy of it. That Rossi was going to be a priest, and is the dark side of the father-confessor now in his job, only adds to the masochistic hunger in her. Punish her. Oh, God, yes, please punish her. She has done wrong. She has done evil.
But she has her pride. She has her dignity. And she really doesn't want to go to jail. So she wants him gone before she gives in and goes entirely under (stubborn, fatally stubborn!).
"I'll take that as a yes," decides Rossi, and in short order, the toaster's metallic chitter announces it has been set. A cupboard bangs; ceramic clinks against the counter. "So what's the story?" he wonders more lazily, baritone coaxed into conversational timbres. "Do the Friends have some sort of hold on you? Threaten you? Your family? What?"
Crap, he's trying to coax. And drawing the correct conclusion about her situation. Damn. Damn.
Leah turns on a slow, dug-in heel. She informs him coldly, "I am not a member of the Friends of Humanity."
She'll cling to that to her dying day, y'all. What horrible lies we tell ourselves to get out of bed in the morning.
So. The smell of toast twines lovingly around coffee; the refrigerator bangs more sharply than its wont, rattling glass in its slam. "Okay," Rossi says agreeably, while metal crashes on the stove. More glass tinkles; a drawer's scrape exhumes a fork. Scrambled eggs. "They've got to be breaking some kind of truth in advertising law with that name. You think? 'Friends of Humanity' my ass. So you're not a member. But they bring you in to interview the people they've kidnapped. What is that, professional courtesy?"
Leah shakes with the intensity of her fist-clenching. It ripples her voice with a false waver, since her expression is perfectly set and her gaze perfectly steady. "I don't know what you're talking about, and I'm not going to talk about it without a lawyer present."
Clinging hard, as I tried to indicate with her shaking and the shake it puts in her voice - which isn't shaking from emotion because she's hard, she's cold, she can do this, he's not going to break her, she cannot be broken (but oh, longs for that, desires it, lusts and thrusts and trusts for it-). I don't like the word perfect and its derivatives in writing unless used humorously or ironically, which is how I use them here. "Perfectly" anything right now, Leah? No. You really aren't. Except maybe "perfectly screwed." Or "perfectly human."
Eggs crack, and are beaten. With prejudice. "You've already forgotten?" marvels Chris from the kitchen, and tips to crane through the breakfast nook, eyes wide and mocking. "There was a newspaper article with your name on it just the other day. What, four days ago. 'Leah Canto,' it said. --Maybe the Times misunderstood."
I like an inquisitor who at least makes you breakfast for your troubles.
A pause. "Rossi." Soft. "Chris." Softer. "Please leave me alone. Put the eggs down and leave. Please."
Trying a different tack: if he can go intimate, she can, too. (Sidebar: I'm starting to see "tact" used in that phrase a lot lately, in the media and on the net, and it's driving me fucking nuts. Aren't they teaching English in school anymore? So many abuses to the language, so little time . . .)
The rattle of egg-beating silences. "Leah." Soft. "Not going to happen." Softer. "Not until you tell me what's going on."
And Rossi's player picks up my pose and caps it the way I did earlier to his. Chemistry, people! Take notes! Send flowers to honor the glory of this player!
"I have nothing to say to you," Leah says stiffly and sits down on the couch. Her back thus to him, she puts her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.
I know how Leah's apartment and furnishings are laid out, but I never assume a reader does (or, for that matter, the other player in the scene), so I strive for clear, helpful stage directions. She's trembling on the brink of nerve-wracked, exhausted fragility here: not ready to cry, but certainly ready to crack.
"That's okay," Rossi says -- threatens -- with a return to normalcy, such as it is. The toaster clanks in victory; the hiss of eggs meeting skittle dulls the baritone voiceover. "I can just talk and you can listen. You want butter on your toast?"
Leah rubs the heel of one hand across her eye, then repeats the process on the other side. "No. I'm not hungry. Not even for a last meal, thanks. Do I get a cigarette, too?"
As evidenced by the bitter sarcasm, another defense mechanism. She has plenty of them. Her eyes are hot and dry. They burn, and they itch. She is worn out and miserable. Life sucks. So does Rossi. So does she.
In answer, plates clatter and the kitchen sizzles. A few moments of blessed muteness (opinions hoard themselves behind will, beating restless, anxious wings against gritted teeth) and then Rossi is back in the living room at last, bearing bounty: plates of toast and eggs; mugs of hot, black coffee. "Here," he says, neutral. "Get some caffeine in you."
Leah jags a laugh. "Before you drag me downtown?"
Breaaaaaaking. Creaking. Teetering. (I realized last night that I write Joelle much as I do Leah, and that makes me unhappy. I should have more diversity in me!)
"You said you weren't one of the Friends," reminds Chris, depositing his burden on the coffee table before claiming a mug for himself. He stands over her, considering. "You lying to me?"
She's actually trying to do anything but. Lying is bad, as she says next, and she has that idealist's stupid attachment to THE TRUTH.
Leah shakes her head, looking at plate and mug. "I don't want to go downtown," she tells him with the frayed edge of humor. "Lying to the police is bad. Even if everyone does it."
Everyone does. Guilty people lie because they have to, and innocent people lie because they think they have to. Did I get that from Homicide? Hell if I know. I read a lot. Watch a lot of TV. It informs my roleplaying! Leah's kinda moved into a numbed zone now, not feeling much but going through the motions. Humor. Sure. That's what you do. Social conventions.
Bad, mouths Rossi, an unseen glitter of matching humor dawning, however grudgingly. "So," he says. And again: "How'd you get mixed up in the Friends?"
"I'm /not,/ dammit. I just write ... articles. Advocating freedom of expression -- you hear of that?" Sullenly Leah transfers her plate from coffee table to knees and stabs at inoffensive eggs. "Two sides to every story. I'm doing the other side, to balance all this shiny-happy 'we love mutants!' crap."
Well, dammit, if he's going to fucking stick around and fucking make her breakfast and fucking interrogate her - then she's going to stab the fuck out of those eggs (instead of his eyes) and trot out her standard journalistic pablum. Choke on it, you son of a bitch.
"Except the Friends aren't the /other side/, Canto," says Rossi with heavy-voiced reason, planting a hand on the sofa's back to lean. "That's like saying al-Qaeda's the other side of democracy. So tell me, how'd you get involved with the /Friends/?"
I liked the al-Qaida parallel, which I have now officially stolen for my own use. That's how it works in Cameronland.
Leah mutters, "The hell I will," and shovels breakfast into her mouth.
Tell him, that is. My writing isn't always clear to me, God knows. My brain doesn't always read the whole pose, see. It grabs interesting (or random) words and constructs a reply to them. Sad, really.
Wonders Chris, grim, "Why not? They got something on you, don't they? Who'd they target? Your family?"
Leah chews and swallows. She picks up her coffee and has a swallow. She puts the mug back on the table. She carves off another bite of eggs and downs it. She does not, under any circumstance, look at her interrogator.
Of course, her non-answer is an answer, and I don't think she even realizes it (because she's not as socially sophisticated as some of us are). She's unconsciously giving him confirmation because that's what she wants to do. Betrayed by her hidden desires!
"That's it, isn't it?" The coffee, forgotten entirely, lowers. Rossi's shadow pitches, creeping across Leah's back. "They're threatening your family."
"Don't be ridiculous," Leah says in a low voice as she stares at the coffee mug on the coffee table and eats her eggs. "You've seen too many movies."
Cf. the discussion above about how she's following a script in her head. Yeah. That hit home, Rossi.
The baritone says over a current of cynicism, "You mean the kind where there are superheroes and supervillains and people have magic powers?" Arms fold; Rossi stoops to lean over them, head dropping black and intimate over Leah's shoulder. His voice softens, quiet. "Welcome to New York City, 2005. We can get them into protection, Canto."
Leah's body shakes. Grimly she keeps eating. "Back off, Rossi."
Literally and figuratively (I keep using that construction a lot! Dammit): being so physically and verbally close is making it worse for her.
"All of them," says Rossi, cajoling, coaxing, the serpent at Eve's breast. His breath tickles her ear, stirring the sensitive hairs at her nape. Memories of tenderness, subverted to purpose. "Your mother, your sister -- you know they killed one of the cops at the Purity rally."
Bastard.
"One of my Uncle Jerry's boys. I know." Leah slides down the couch away from him. Her shoulders are still trembling, but she's still chewing eggs. "I went to the memorial service. It was nice."
I was, in a certain morbid way, proud of her there. She moved away, physically and verbally. She did not succumb. She coasted serenely through his bastardly attempts at manipulation. It's like growth or something. In a bad, broken way. Jerry is Jordy's twin brother, we've established, and he's also married to Ginnie, who's come up in a log before. Somehow, my brain keeps track of this information - better than it does RL people, in fact.
"I was there." Treacherous Chris, voice nudging against her awareness, stroking lightly at the threads of conscience and morality. Coffee-warmed fingers touch that line of throat, brushing into the pulse beneath the skin. "Lots of dead. I probably would've been one of them, you think? Friends' bullet, Brotherhood bullet -- what's the difference?"
Leah says flatly, "No difference. Dead is dead. Isn't that what you always say? I'll go to your funeral, too. Dance at your wake."
Now that she has her metaphysical legs under her, she turns his own words right back at him, like a slap in the face. You can die, Rossi, and I won't give a damn. Treat you like any other dead cop I've known. What a nice funeral, too bad about him, so sorry for the family - hey, are those ham sandwiches by the grieving brother? Great, I'm starved! Shorter form: Fuck off and die, Christopher. She is absolutely in a hateful, angry, bitter, tormented place, and everyone who tries to get close to her will suffer from her wrath at such temerity (when she's trying so hard to protect them by pushing them away! What gratitude!). Ain't psychology grand?
A pause. Unseen, a muscle jerks in Chris's jaw. "You really believe the shit the Friends believe in?"
Eggs are done. Plate's on the table. Leah picks up her coffee and walks away from him, to the windows, and stands and sips and looks out. "Someone has to speak for them," she says, still without inflection. "Are you really surprised?"
He's still getting to her, though, which is why she keeps moving away from him, even further away. It's easier to bullshit him (not the same as lying!) this way. Keep her distance. Keep that cool, slightly ironic aloofness.
"Yeah," says Rossi, frankly. "I am. I have a hard time believing you're that stupid."
Leah snorts into her mug. "No, you're not. You've never thought that much of me. I was Gabe's girlfriend, remember?"
A slip from professional into personal, with the introduction of dearling big brother Gabriel. She's not above snide attacks, and she does believe he thinks she's stupid, whatever he just said, which is why she lashes out and in that way: bring up Gabe, the abuser, the user, the manipulator, the high-minded asshole. She feels some petty superiority because she dumped him, triumphed over him, as even his brother couldn't do (as she also believes). A lot of overcompensating inferiority and poor self-esteem here.
"That was then. This is now. /Dammit/, Leah--" Frustration roils, slipping its leash for a moment. Is bitten back. Reason is the way to go. "Are you out of your fucking mind?"
With a calm look back at him, composed and wan, Leah sips coffee. "Maybe. Why do you care? Do your job or leave me alone. I told you already."
That's cold of her. I like it. I approve. Good characterization. Go, me! She got a reaction out of him; that's what she wanted, as payback for the shit he's putting her through.
Teeth show white. "Convenient peace and quiet," says Rossi, straightening to skirt around the sofa's edge and sink a hip on its arm. "Prefer not to have people pointing out that what you're doing is insane?"
Leah shrugs and returns to watching the day outside her apartment. "I don't care what they say. I'm doing my job, and I'm doing a good job of it. What else matters?"
Still cool, still cold. She's indifferent to this line of attack. She's retreated back to numbness and aloofness.
"They're /terrorists/, Canto," bites Rossi, temper flaring again to skew patience. "Fucking /terrorists/. They kidnapped the guy. --You could get thrown in jail for being an accessory to a crime, goddammit."
Leah swallows, but keeps her voice steady. "Well, then I will. Journalists have done time before, and maybe I'll get a great expose out of it. You never know! Gotta look on the bright side, Rossi."
Doesn't want to go to jail, no. Feels guilty about kindly, smart, wise, brave Dr. Grey (so much braver than she was in Tom's basement!). She's not a terrorist. She's not. Not not not! A return of the defensive sarcasm, and I thought about Judy Miller, but of course, this is AU Earth, so that mess probably didn't happen on XMM, without a Bush White House or a neocon-driven Iraq War to embroil the Times in journalistic prostitution for the purposes of jingoistic propaganda. Right?
Anger, rarely distant, fans itself hot in the green eyes. Deliberate, careful, Rossi plants his mug on the coffee table, out of reach. Out of use. "You're pissing me off," he informs, Brooklyn-harsh. "What is this bullshit? You're not this stupid. You're not this ... goddammit, you're not this /stupid/. Don't tell me you're just doing it for the money, because I've seen you turn shit away for fucking /principles/."
I could definitely feel the intimations of violence coming off him, like heat waves, so it's well that he put the cup down. We players are pp_ok with each other, totally carte blanche, and I was half waiting for him to hurt her, definitely. She'd just fight back, anyway. Maybe.
"It's damned good money," muses Leah as she breathes across the top of her gently steaming mug. "And I got to be on Larry King Live. Me. All by myself. Never had /that/ happen before. He's a nice guy, you know? Even if the suspenders are now and always have been and always will be entirely too much. Silly old man."
And oh, she might be tempting him to that edge, too. Hurt her. Punish her. Make her feel as bad in body as she feels in spirit. Penance. And vindication of what a terrible person she believes she is. Gratuitous Larry King mockery just because . . . well, because. It's Larry King, and it's gratuitous, and so frankly is he.
"Is it the fucking /fame/?" rasps Rossi, incredulous for a split second before belief, more terrible, sweeps it away. "That's what they got you with? Putting you in the spotlight, getting the offers, having the exclusive?"
Leah angles a beatific smile over her shoulder. "It's just delightful to hear how well you think of me, Chris. Maybe you should just leave me as your whore and have done with it."
A call-back to a scene with Tom, where she thought that about herself in the accompanying journal entry: that at least he hasn't made her his literal whore. She's wrapped up in her own drama, yes. She does appreciate the fame, too. It's seductive. More drama!
Again the muscle jumps, sharp-etched against the skin. "Nice try, Canto, but I've been related to Gabe longer than you've dated him. You're out of your league, if you're thinking of pushing me off. Tell me /why/."
Grimacing, Leah turns to sit on the sill. She daintily fluffs her robe across her legs and then sets the mug alongside her seat. "Or else?" she says, and some black memory whispers in her voice and peers out of her bleak eyes.
"Or else" is the crux of her relationship with FoH and Tom - more call-back, more echo. I like the dainty fluffing. Very ladylike. Contrasts. Juxtapositions.
Or /else/. Rossi straightens on a hasty jerk, and strides at Leah to slam his arm into the wall beside her. Temper roils, barbed; hurt crouches behind its shield, bleeding. "I don't want to end up taking you downtown, Canto. --Dammit, Leah. Tell me you're the victim here." Almost a plea.
He's getting close to the end of his rope. Give him something. Give him some reason to believe in. Something to make this make sense.
Leah looks up at him. A smile teases at her mouth. "You want to save me?" She runs a hand down his front, pensively watching fingers' glide, and looks up again. No smile now. "Knight in shining armor?"
God, I love that touch so much. It's not sexual; it's not even sensual. It's almost clinical: an assessment, or the recapitulation of some memory that might be all she's left with, if he goes away and never comes back. She's not mocking. Not much, anyway. Someone to save her? Yes, she'd like that very much. But she doesn't want it, either. Wants it, doesn't want it. Needs him, pushes him away.
"Fuck you," snaps Chris, bending into his arm -- into that hand's caress -- before catching her fingers in his. Squeezes. Gentles, with a forced press of will. "Tell me why you're helping them."
"I think," Leah says quietly but clearly, "that I should have an attorney present. I really do." She worms her hand free and presents both of them to him, wrists pressed together, waiting only for the cuffs. Her eyes are simmering, shimmering pools of old-leaf brown.
I love that move even more. (I blow my own horn!) Waiting to be cuffed. Such masochism. Such drama. I use "simmering, shimmering" (or the other way around) a lot. Too much. And other such rhymes. It's like all the repeated epithets and adjectives in Homer's poetry: placeholder shit your brain churns out automatically while you're trying to think of the next cool thing to say.
Chris stills. Regards her with shadowed, hungry eyes. "Don't do this."
Leah bites her lip. "I have to," she whispers. "Enough people have died, haven't they?" Her arms stay out, but they shake. They shake.
About as close to a confession as she's going to give and he's going to get. Take her. Punish her. She gives up (but she doesn't, she can't, she won't).
"They're threatening you," Chris murmurs back. Catches up one of those hands again -- binds its wrist with his strong, strong hand -- to press a desperate kiss against its fingers.
Blood trickles down Leah's chin. "I can't -- I can't talk -- Christ, Chris, you /know/ -- if I /say/ anything--"
Bit her lip. I did not bother to explicate that until a few poses down the line. Why? Because I was CAUGHT UP IN THE MOMENT. Deal. Such awful, naked intimacy and terror and need and hunger and hope here between them. Awesome-o. We write good people, not just characters. I'm proud of us.
"I'll help you," Rossi promises, reckless knight. Matching hurt catches at his breath; he drops to his haunches, a thumb warm and rough against the ribbon of red. "Don't do that. /Leah/. We'll put your family in protection--"
"No." Leah wrenches her head away from his touch, collects her hand again, hugs herself. "Chris, I can't say anything to you," she says to the dining table across the apartment, where she's looking and looking /hard./ "I can't, and I won't. Stop pushing me. Stop /pushing/ me!" Hysteria wends urgent through her voice, like the dribble of lip-bitten blood.
There we go: bitten lip, finally. (Lazy ass.) He's trying to reach her, to help her, and she's trying to push him away, and the strain of it all! She's not imaginative enough to go mad, fortunately, or she would do that by the end of this arc. Hysteria and the bleeding lip - Joelle. Dammit. I do need more diversity in my writing. Same old tricks, over and over again.
The green eyes chill behind the sweep of lashes, speculation (suspicion) sweeping across the apartment and its innocence. "It's okay, Canto," Rossi says in an abrupt about-face, dropping next to the woman to wind his arm around her shoulder. Reels in, determined. "I won't push. Look. I'm not pushing. Calm down."
Leah balls up her fist and pounds his shoulder. Just once, and softly. "Dammit," she despairs. "Why does everyone have to push? And push and push and-- I'm just doing my job! I'm doing my job! I'm reporting, and I'm getting paid for it, and I have new agents and a bodyguard and--" And hiccup. And tremors.
Hysteria, blah blah blah. The emotional climax has passed; it's all downhill from here. Boring. Heh. She's totally passing Nathan off as a bodyguard, too. Thinks she's clever (knows in her heart she's not).
"Just following orders," says Chris in grave, biting mockery -- and then remembers a second later and atones, apologetic. "I didn't mean that. Shh. Leah." Grudging compassion wraps its sheath around his voice, dulling its edge; the arm tightens, contracting into Rossi comfort, Rossi security. Quiet, subdued, he says, "I'm sorry. You know what you're doing, I guess."
Leah hits harder. "This isn't fucking Nuremberg," she snarls.
I found out later in the week that this scene occurred on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nuremberg trials. I had no idea.
"You're with a group that's talking genocide," Chris snaps back, unable, unwilling to hold his tongue. "Thin end of the wedge, Canto. You think-- never mind." And so much for comfort.
Leah shoves her head into his shoulder now. Canto stubbornness, Canto pigheadedness. "I'm not talking genocide. I'm not /with/ them. I'm /not./"
She is, and she knows it. I tried to match the name/trait repetition, but couldn't think of good words on the fly. Sometimes my well, it goes dry. (Oh, shit, I rhymed that. Sorry.)
"You're preaching their word," Rossi says grimly, (and so much for silence and understanding.) "You're /spreading/ it. Helping them look like reasonable people so they can shove the shit they do under the carpet. Kidnapping. Murder. A dead /cop/."
"I didn't kill a cop!" Leah wails softly.
That oblique accusation just kills her, even though she knows it's not true. Or fair. Damn him for using that on her. On her, of all people!
"You're an accessory to /kidnapping/," Chris reminds, bruising. "It's only a matter of /time/."
Leah breathes, "No," fervently, hotly, and whips her head through a negatory shake. "I had no idea what was going on with Dr. Grey. Before, during, after -- /nothing./ Any defense lawyer would have it thrown out of court for lack of a prima facie case. I'm doing my /job./" She clings to that, even as she clings to him.
"Negatory"? Really? Okay. I come up with words that I probably shouldn't sometimes. I don't edit poses; I brain-dump and hit enter. Not always the best policy in rp. She's still a bit hysterical here, but she's probably right about the prima facie: she was brought in ex post facto, she didn't plan or participate in the actual kidnapping, and so on. A good lawyer could get that thrown out, and she'd have access to the best, thanks to her new agents and their money and contacts, and it'd be a whole big stupid circus over nothing much, so let's just not even bother, right, criminal justice system? (This is how I justify her involvement with the kidnapping, because man, I do need logical reasons and ramifications because I don't want to godmode or Mary Sue this business. Any of it. Rp needs to make sense in internally consistent, real-world terms; otherwise, we might as well all go off and write happy fluffy bunny fanfic in our own little dream worlds. IMO.)
Chris squeezes, a little harder, a little fiercer: angrily, (protectively, possessively) -- "A /crime/," he says with bitter emphasis. "A harmless old guy who gets traumatized, whose family gets to be terrorized, just because -- what, exactly? You /knew/ the guy'd been kidnapped, you knew who had them. Why the fuck didn't you say something, Canto?"
Leah lifts her head and asks bitterly, "Who was I going to tell? You? Lazzaro? And watch you happy bastards plunge in where you shouldn't and get shot down for your noble pains."
I like "happy bastards." And mentioning Vincent! Hi, Vincent! How's it hangin'? That big shiny gun of yours, that is.
"God/da/-- Christ, Canto. What do you think this is, some kind of movie?" Exasperation hinges Chris's sweep up, the jerk of head that breezes black hair and flames the green eyes. "Believe it or not, the NYPD's got /people/ for this kind of shit. Give us a little credit for being professionals."
She cringes, but doesn't back down. "I'm not talking about it anymore." Leah stonewalls instead. Again; some more. "Give /me/ the same credit. It's my profession. It's my life. Things are quiet now, aren't they? So."
"It never stays quiet," says Chris, prophetic and far-eyed Cassandra. "So the rally's over. What's the next thing? Who's the next person they decide to shut up?"
Leah looks at him. "Me, probably."
She's expendable. She makes a move out of line, or she loses media access, or just fades in usefulness - they axe her. Quite possibly literally, with an actual axe. She has nightmares about that. (Ah, Cassandra. Poor girl.)
Rossi bruises in earnest, one hand convulsing around a wrist. "/Leah/."
A sob, twisted out of her like the last spoonful of water from a worn, dirty dishrag. "/Stop/ it. Stop it! Let me go, Rossi!"
What's with these physically abusive assholes in her life? Man! Grar! (Man grar!) As he notes in a later scene, she does bruise easily, and he does leave marks here. She's already high-strung, hysterical under the veneer of cynical calm, so the hurt just pushes her closer to the edge.
Belatedly realizing, muscles relax, manacles loosening and falling away: from wrist, from shoulders. "Do you have some kind of death wish?" Rossi demands, baritone cresting towards anger again, breaking past unease. "What the fuck is /wrong/ with you?"
Leah cradles her wrist and glares at him with rheumy eyes. "What, before or after a member of the New York Police Department assaulted me?"
Grar! Defensive-sarcasm grar! I think her death wish is past, but her psyche is so muddled and tortuously convoluted about itself right now, I really couldn't say for certain. It might come back, rising like swamp gas through the crevices of her poor broken brain. I like "rheumy." Need to remember to use it again. My vocabularly comes and goes, like the tides.
The green-eyed gaze settles like moth wings on Leah's wrist, fleeting and light, before swinging back to the woman's face. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," Chris breathes, making the names a curse -- and jerks upright to stalk away, punishing the floor for its mistress's failings.
Rossi's player used "moth" because I'd been wondering aloud why I'd used "spoonful" up there - because I'd been thinking about The Tick? We amuse ourselves and each other with little in-jokes.
Gingerly Leah resettles on the windowsill. She even picks up her coffee for a swallow (and a grimace: it's cooled by now). "Blasphemy suits you," she sends after him sarcastically.
The man's very body is an oath, carved out of obscenity and borne in profanity; he excoriates as he moves, snatching the discarded plate and fork from the coffee table to bear it into the kitchen. Things crash, slapping their sharp voiced protest into the sink. "You want a refill?"
Rossi's player writes better than I do. Have I mentioned yet this week that he's the best rp'er I've ever worked with?
"No." Leah rubs her forehead. Sounds tired. "I want to go back to bed and pretend this never happened."
"Bad dream?" asks the kitchen, falsely consoling. "The conversation? Or the Sinn Fein life? --You're not getting rid of me, Canto. I'm not Alyssa, or Melcross."
Leah says sweetly, "Or Gabe."
Bitch. Damn, Leah.
Something cracks in the kitchen. Water hisses. "Broke a plate," Chris reports, utterly without remorse. "Sorry about the fork. I'll bring some pliers by and fix it later."
Of course, he doesn't have to start smashing the crockery, now, does he? Jerk.
"No need. I have pliers. I even know how to use them. Failing that--" Leah shrugs and folds her arms over soft, terryclothed belly "--I have other forks. You wanna ruin more of my stuff, or maybe beat me up some more, go ahead. Do what you have to do, Rossi. It's all any of us can do."
Bitter, cynical mockery of hope. Yeah, she's doing what she has to do. She believes that because she has to.
Hidden in the kitchen, Rossi braces his arms wide and slouches between them, head hanging, eyes closed, temper mangled by anxiety. Water whines between them, counterpoint to his silence. "You're making me crazy," he says at last, bland and conversational again. "I can't figure out whether to beat some sense into you, or lock you in a closet to keep you safe."
Leah croons, "You love me."
I . . . think she might not be joking or mocking about that. Because of what he just said. That sounds like a declaration of caring from a Rossi, absolutely, and she could be projecting, too, since she's quite falling in love with him (again with the filling soul-holes and addiction neediness). Poor Rossi. I really felt for him in that pose: caught in doing the right thing, trapped and unable to make it make sense or make it better. For either of them, I suppose.
No answer. Another crack. "Broke your other plate," says Rossi, almost cheerfully. "I feel better."
"My poor plates. Don't make me come over there, asshole."
If I'm doing unattributed dialogue, you can assume that there's no particular inflection placed on it, and that's the case here. Leah doesn't care about her plates. Or about him. Except that she does because she's materialistic and in love with him. I hope I'm not the only one who finds such contradictions interesting. It's how people work! Seriously! But maybe it comes off as too cliché. I dunno.
"They were ugly plates." Heartless Chris. He eyes them thoughtfully; slaps a large fragment against the counter to splinter it in half again. Crash. Tinkle. "You sure you don't want more coffee?"
Leah growls a curse. "Will it make you stop breaking my shit?"
"It's already broken. Do you want more coffee?"
"Breaking more of my shit, then," Leah clarifies angrily. She huffs a breath. "God. Fine. Coffee, yespleasethankyoumisterdetective."
I don't think I've ever run words together like that. Ha. It's dorky, but what the hell. And stop breaking her shit, Rossi!
Detective Rossi stalks out of the kitchen like a rumpled heron, bright-eyed and beady-, coffee carafe in hand. Pours. Glowers at Leah. Stalks back. Announces from that increasingly fractured nest, "Beston's primary on the John Grey kidnapping."
Leah sips. "So he'll be throwing me into the box today. D'you think I have time to get dressed first? I don't want to force you guys to give up a great psychological advantage, but the weather does leave me a little cold these days. Hate to get sick."
Defense mechanism, yeah. She'd be fine with him dragging her down there in just her robe, why not, she's got nothing to hide, and isn't it a great metaphor, that, being naked in body and naked in truth and shining justice? Her defense mechanisms are always spring-loaded with traps, too: hurt other people before they can hurt her.
"Get dressed," Rossi suggests, over the thunk of plate portions being tossed in the garbage. "We're off until this afternoon."
"Thanks," Leah says and pushes off from the sill. Coffee mug goes on coffee table. Robe goes on couch. Naked woman goes in bedroom. And door? Door slams shut.
I like that sequence: methodical, logical, calm. She breaks down for a little in the bedroom. Damned if she'll show that to him.
The sink hisses a few moments longer, exploited for the cleaning of utensils. Chris emerges into the empty living room, leans into the door, and inspects the apartment again: in silence, in deep and hostile suspicion. Straightens. Glances towards the bedroom -- and then stalks out, sweeping the robe with him. Trade for the old newspaper, left glaring on the coffee table: Friends of Humanity Suspected in Cop Death. The door closes, leaving the apartment in relative peace. Quiet guilt. The echoes of argument.
Love that closing! Ambiguous notes of emotion. Beston did interrogate her later in the day, in full-on Disappointed Father-Figure mode. Rossi got kicked out of the room. Leah didn't say a damn thing to any of them and went home and got blindingly drunk.
[Commentary for X-Men MUCK. Please see the full list for more.]
Originally posted: November 20, 2005
Written: November 30, 2005
What Has Come Before: The Friends of Humanity kidnapped John Grey and then got their Purity asses blowed up real good at the Brotherhood-crashed rally. A few days before that, Leah's FoH minder, Nathan, brought her to Tom, who brought her to Dr. Grey for an interview, which she published in the New York Times to some media and political kerfuffle. Regular folks read it, too, including members of the NYPD, and some of them would dearly like to know how Ms. Canto is connected to the Grey kidnapping and to the Friends.
We players figured we'd have this scene because, yeah, Rossi needs to yell at Leah. I think that's about as detailed as our planning went (and most of the time, we don't even go that far, just show up and wait for magic to happen). I enjoyed the scene, had fun with it, had fun with Rossi's player . . . but I'm a little unhappy with how I've been handling Leah's job. I feel like I need to make more postings, to her LJ and to the IC News bboard, for proper presentation of what she's doing. It's one thing for me to say, "She's a well-known political reporter and commentator," but another to actually show that. Evidence. Proof. I will try to do better there!
But the scene itself was good. I'm just cranky about my failings as a player. As always.
Sunday: God's day. In Chris Rossi parlance, a different matter altogether, fallen hard and fast from the Church's grace and bidding fair to plummet farther. Temper in abeyance, a newspaper's front page rolled for smiting purpose in a hand, he ambles up the hallway to Leah Canto's apartment, girded in righteous judgment and -- for modesty's sake -- jeans and a T-shirt. A fist knocks doom upon the door. Thump. Thump. "Police. Open up." Thump.
Poooooleeeeece! I'm a lazy ass; I made him set. I adore the fancy writing. I'm too lazy to match it. Rossi's player reads better books than I do, I think. That's the key. It's nice of the char to have dressed before coming upstairs. Very thoughtful.
...Thump. A softer one: a pillow, pushed off Leah's bed with her convulsive reentry into consciousness. Blearily she blinks towards the door, then at the clock, and then at the pillow (why not). "I'll kill him," she mumbles and drags herself out of bed and into a fuzzy, ratty blue terrycloth robe. Goes to the door. Opens it. Announces, "I'll kill you."
Should've gone back to the last time I used the robe to see if it's the same color, but eh. We'll say she has many robes (as I do for Shaw, for the same reason: lazy!). I believe Leah did go to church, but the early service, and now she's trying to catch up on sleep afterwards because that's what you do on Sunday (speaking from experience). She does sleep in the nude. All my chars do because I do and, once again, I'm lazy: I write what I know! So, robe. I also wanted to play her a little humorously to counterpoint the Sturm und Drang I knew was coming up. It's all about striking those different notes, to make each of them clearer and more powerful.
"Threatening bodily harm to a cop," mocks Rossi, pushing his way past Leah with peremptory assurance. "That'll look good on your record. We do a mug shot, you should wear that outfit. The blue sets off your teeth. --What the fuck, Canto. The /Friends/?"
Leah peers into the empty hallway for a suspended moment. Thought finally kicks in, kicks /her,/ and she shuts the door and turns around. "Huh?"
Too many words. Flying at her. She's barely registering it's him, let alone that he's talking. Thought processes moving sluggishly. God, I have been there: staring out the door, holding it open, perfectly blank in the head and contentedly so. Could've stood there all day. Again, writing what I know. Lazy, lazy. But funny!
The newspaper slaps to the coffee table, showing an irrelevant byline; a frown skips across to Leah, measures her, then moves on to the kitchen. "You got coffee? Let me make you some coffee. Then we can have a little talk about you and some of your new associates. How's that?"
Leah blinks. "I don't have a record."
Rossi's player started beating me for making him laugh. Trying to play angry here! No laughing! I don't play Leah's light side enough, so stuff it. It's funny. I'm funny. I'm fucking hilarious. He's in full-on detective mode, and Leah's still halfway in bed. She doesn't have a record, though; she's right about that. Never got busted for anything, not even the heroin in college. Good girl!
"You will if you keep this shit up," pitches the drawl of baritone from the kitchen. Cabinets slam; water sluices into the coffeemaker's carafe. "Go wash your face. Get find wherever it is you've been keeping your brain and stick it back in your head. Kidnapping, Canto. Not to mention association with a terrorist organization. What do you think you are, Barney? Think you'll squirm out of it with great big purple charm?"
Barney. Kyrie eleison. Stop making me laugh!
"I'm not purple!" protests Leah on her wander back into the living room. Her hands hang loose and heavy in the robe's pockets, and she stares at him. "Barney? I just wrote a thing. Got me a lot of money. And press. Did you see me on TV?"
I hear that last sentence pitched in something of a schoolgirl's eager wistfulness: Didja see me? Huh? Was I good? Didja like it? Was I pretty? She cares what people think about her work. She's proud of it. She's proud of herself. But she does want the validation, and she cares more about his opinion, in particular, than she'd really like to. Dammit. She mentions the money first. I guess that matters more to her (in sleepiness veritas!). The press is nice, too, though. Again, I need to do a better job of describing her job: the kind of notice she gets, the minutiae of her job, her routines, and so on. I do it for Shaw, right? So I should do it for her. I will. I swear.
A green eye caps itself with black, and squints at Leah across the breakfast counter. "I had a date with a corpse. And then MA. You been reading the news, Canto? Miller came back. Woman's like a bad fart in a closed room. --Go wash your face."
Leah marvels, "Is my /face/ purple?"
Rossi's player really did not want me making him laugh so much. Ahem. He does a lot of color posing, more even than I do; I feel like I have to keep up, but I usually don't. Leah has browny-bronze hair and pale skin and pale-brown eyes. There. Fine. Rossi's better looking, anyway; let's describe him more! I don't know that Leah cares about Sabella's second death that much: it's weird, but it's mutants, and that shit happens, apparently. She's also still trying to wake up and figure out what the bleeding fuck is going on here.
"Yes." The sink shuts off with a squeak. Rossi turns away to busy himself with the coffee maker. "Now go wake up."
That player's so much better than I with details in scenes, especially with inanimate objects. He has a bond with inanimate objects that approaches the spiritual. I view them more as stage props, from my theatre background. I steal from him. All the time.
"Shit," Leah mutters and goes into the bathrooom. Tap on (hiss). Tap off (shush). She reemerges with her face scrubbed and beads of water outlining her sleep-soft features like translucent bangles. Patting absently at cheeks and brow to mop them up, she leans over the counter and studies him from there. "You're mad. At me."
See? Stealing. Rossi's player poses something; I copy it in my reply. And thus chemistry is built, trading back and forth like happy little ions. I've been talking with a couple people about chemistry - what it is, how you build it - and I do think give-and-take is a huge part of it: where you can build on each other's work with call-backs and elaborations, where you trust each other to push boundaries as far and in whatever directions they need to go, where you develop each other's character at the same time you're developing your own. I know chemistry from stage-acting, when you can certainly feel it with fellow actors, and it's much the same, for me, online. I feel the bonds (and the absence of them, there's that, too). Trust, reliance, collaboration, joy. And this player and I have had more than a decade to put that into practice, so yeah, plenty of chemistry here.
Back to the scene: Leah's awake, and she knows pretty well why he's here, but she's gonna see what she can suss out before they really get into it. She craves their drama, their anger, their passion. Addictive habit. Goes hand-in-hand with her lust for politics and journalism, for idealism, for drinking and drugging and churching and sexing. Like many people, she has many holes in her soul that she tries to fill. The FoH business is stretching her out more, tattering her, drawing the holes larger, so she's acting out more, seeking more. There are all kinds of ways to be a junkie. It's all brain chemistry, you know, in the end, and Rossi is a helluva drug.
Hips settled against the back counter, already perfumed by the first seductive, draft-borne scents of brewing coffee, Chris folds his arms across his chest and cants his head at Leah. "Mad," he echoes, mellowly enough."Why should I be mad? Turns out you associate with the Friends of Humanity. You were a knowing participant in a kidnapping. You /interviewed/ -- shit, Canto. You /know/ Professor Grey."
Cautiously Leah allows, "I've met him before. Am I under arrest, Detective? Do I call my lawyer?"
I love the smell of coffee. Can't stand to drink it (too bitter), but oh, that smell. Little panic alarms are flaring in Leah's head right now because she was an ex post facto participant, kinda, and she has more than a passing familiarity with the law, because of her early years as a reporter (working the metro beat, covering cases, investigating some) and her cop family. She's asking him as a possible suspect, then: is it Miranda time?
"I'm thinking about it," Rossi bites back, the first hint of temper stabbing through his voice. "What the fuck, Leah? Are you completely nuts?"
And he pings back with first-name intimacy. Oh, she suspects that. She does. Word games. Playing good cop on her? Leah's become suspicious of everything in her life. Everyone. I haven't written much about her NPC friends because she honestly has withdrawn from them, as she has her family (well, and there was that whole Thanksgiving Day disaster with them, too). The FoH have isolated her - or, more properly, she's isolated herself because of what she thinks she should do. She really is half-following a movie script in her head, for What You Do When Being Extorted By Bad Guys. Most of the time she knows she's aping Hollywood, but she's at a loss for what else to do. She doesn't have much framework for this terrible mess, so movies and TV it is! And she knows that's dumb, and she's embarrassed, but goddamn. What else is there? Witness protection? Yeah, right. She's seen those movies, too, thanks.
"No," and Leah slouches lower over the counter, supported on pushed-apart elbows and pushed-back feet. She picks at a chip in the Formica with her thumbnail. "I'm not nuts," she says bitterly. "I'm just doing my job, and fuck you, Rossi. You wanna drag me in to talk to the Feds or whoever about Dr. Grey, you go ahead, but--" hot pale eyes snap up at him, and her mouth is an ugly, squashed pink worm "--you can get the fuck out of my apartment otherwise."
So. She's embarrassed, scared, defensive, backed into a corner by herself more than by anyone or anything else - so she lashes out. Because that is what Leah Cantos do. I apologize to people a lot for her. I suppose I shouldn't: conflict and mean, pissy, shallow humanity are good in rp, right? IC/OOC again. I fear that if I keep playing her like this, no one will want to play with me on any of my alts because OMG what a drama queen and a bitch, just look at her characters! (Shaw also being a drama queen and a bitch when it suits him.) So I have self-esteem issues. I'm a member of the club; I have a jacket and everything. Still and all, dammit, it is human, and I do like her mean pissiness. Her terrible weakness inside her strength. Her fatal stubbornness. She just can't give in, even when she should. It's going to kill her. Rossi's player liked the "worm" thing. I've used it before, but hey, positive reinforcement! I'll keep using it.
"I'm making you coffee," the man informs with wild, sweet menace. Kindness. Between friends. He unfolds, leaning to brace his own arms wide against the sink's edge, sympathy carved deep on the hard face. "Everyone needs coffee to start out a productive day of black, malevolent evil-doing. It's the American way. Coffee, morning paper, then chaos."
That "wild, sweet menace" is awesome beyond the telling of it. I want to bend him over the counter myself, and I have, like, zero sex drive. Just an all-around great pose. This player is also addictive.
Leah jerks away from the counter. "Asshole," she snarls and stalks away, fists tight at her sides.
The kitchen breathes in. Exhales coffee. Wonders, nicely, "Want some toast?"
Anthropomorphizing! Props, people, mad props.
"I want," Leah grits through her teeth, "to kill you, as I said. Get out of here, Rossi. Go."
I was also apologizing a lot in this scene, even if only in my head, because she really did want him gone, and that would've been the end of the scene, and I would've been sad. He's interrogating her. She knows that. And part of her wants it. Desperately, fervently, like a dehydrated woman in the desert offered a glass of acid rain. She so much wants to scourge and flagellate herself, be punished for bad girl such a bad bad girl that she's gone back to the Catholic Church she grew to hate in her teens and left in her early twenties (although you never really leave the Catholic Church, hm?) and she'd love for him to just put her on a rack, literal or figurative, and crank all her sins out of her. Terrible, terrifying release; she'd expire from the black and bleeding joy of it. That Rossi was going to be a priest, and is the dark side of the father-confessor now in his job, only adds to the masochistic hunger in her. Punish her. Oh, God, yes, please punish her. She has done wrong. She has done evil.
But she has her pride. She has her dignity. And she really doesn't want to go to jail. So she wants him gone before she gives in and goes entirely under (stubborn, fatally stubborn!).
"I'll take that as a yes," decides Rossi, and in short order, the toaster's metallic chitter announces it has been set. A cupboard bangs; ceramic clinks against the counter. "So what's the story?" he wonders more lazily, baritone coaxed into conversational timbres. "Do the Friends have some sort of hold on you? Threaten you? Your family? What?"
Crap, he's trying to coax. And drawing the correct conclusion about her situation. Damn. Damn.
Leah turns on a slow, dug-in heel. She informs him coldly, "I am not a member of the Friends of Humanity."
She'll cling to that to her dying day, y'all. What horrible lies we tell ourselves to get out of bed in the morning.
So. The smell of toast twines lovingly around coffee; the refrigerator bangs more sharply than its wont, rattling glass in its slam. "Okay," Rossi says agreeably, while metal crashes on the stove. More glass tinkles; a drawer's scrape exhumes a fork. Scrambled eggs. "They've got to be breaking some kind of truth in advertising law with that name. You think? 'Friends of Humanity' my ass. So you're not a member. But they bring you in to interview the people they've kidnapped. What is that, professional courtesy?"
Leah shakes with the intensity of her fist-clenching. It ripples her voice with a false waver, since her expression is perfectly set and her gaze perfectly steady. "I don't know what you're talking about, and I'm not going to talk about it without a lawyer present."
Clinging hard, as I tried to indicate with her shaking and the shake it puts in her voice - which isn't shaking from emotion because she's hard, she's cold, she can do this, he's not going to break her, she cannot be broken (but oh, longs for that, desires it, lusts and thrusts and trusts for it-). I don't like the word perfect and its derivatives in writing unless used humorously or ironically, which is how I use them here. "Perfectly" anything right now, Leah? No. You really aren't. Except maybe "perfectly screwed." Or "perfectly human."
Eggs crack, and are beaten. With prejudice. "You've already forgotten?" marvels Chris from the kitchen, and tips to crane through the breakfast nook, eyes wide and mocking. "There was a newspaper article with your name on it just the other day. What, four days ago. 'Leah Canto,' it said. --Maybe the Times misunderstood."
I like an inquisitor who at least makes you breakfast for your troubles.
A pause. "Rossi." Soft. "Chris." Softer. "Please leave me alone. Put the eggs down and leave. Please."
Trying a different tack: if he can go intimate, she can, too. (Sidebar: I'm starting to see "tact" used in that phrase a lot lately, in the media and on the net, and it's driving me fucking nuts. Aren't they teaching English in school anymore? So many abuses to the language, so little time . . .)
The rattle of egg-beating silences. "Leah." Soft. "Not going to happen." Softer. "Not until you tell me what's going on."
And Rossi's player picks up my pose and caps it the way I did earlier to his. Chemistry, people! Take notes! Send flowers to honor the glory of this player!
"I have nothing to say to you," Leah says stiffly and sits down on the couch. Her back thus to him, she puts her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.
I know how Leah's apartment and furnishings are laid out, but I never assume a reader does (or, for that matter, the other player in the scene), so I strive for clear, helpful stage directions. She's trembling on the brink of nerve-wracked, exhausted fragility here: not ready to cry, but certainly ready to crack.
"That's okay," Rossi says -- threatens -- with a return to normalcy, such as it is. The toaster clanks in victory; the hiss of eggs meeting skittle dulls the baritone voiceover. "I can just talk and you can listen. You want butter on your toast?"
Leah rubs the heel of one hand across her eye, then repeats the process on the other side. "No. I'm not hungry. Not even for a last meal, thanks. Do I get a cigarette, too?"
As evidenced by the bitter sarcasm, another defense mechanism. She has plenty of them. Her eyes are hot and dry. They burn, and they itch. She is worn out and miserable. Life sucks. So does Rossi. So does she.
In answer, plates clatter and the kitchen sizzles. A few moments of blessed muteness (opinions hoard themselves behind will, beating restless, anxious wings against gritted teeth) and then Rossi is back in the living room at last, bearing bounty: plates of toast and eggs; mugs of hot, black coffee. "Here," he says, neutral. "Get some caffeine in you."
Leah jags a laugh. "Before you drag me downtown?"
Breaaaaaaking. Creaking. Teetering. (I realized last night that I write Joelle much as I do Leah, and that makes me unhappy. I should have more diversity in me!)
"You said you weren't one of the Friends," reminds Chris, depositing his burden on the coffee table before claiming a mug for himself. He stands over her, considering. "You lying to me?"
She's actually trying to do anything but. Lying is bad, as she says next, and she has that idealist's stupid attachment to THE TRUTH.
Leah shakes her head, looking at plate and mug. "I don't want to go downtown," she tells him with the frayed edge of humor. "Lying to the police is bad. Even if everyone does it."
Everyone does. Guilty people lie because they have to, and innocent people lie because they think they have to. Did I get that from Homicide? Hell if I know. I read a lot. Watch a lot of TV. It informs my roleplaying! Leah's kinda moved into a numbed zone now, not feeling much but going through the motions. Humor. Sure. That's what you do. Social conventions.
Bad, mouths Rossi, an unseen glitter of matching humor dawning, however grudgingly. "So," he says. And again: "How'd you get mixed up in the Friends?"
"I'm /not,/ dammit. I just write ... articles. Advocating freedom of expression -- you hear of that?" Sullenly Leah transfers her plate from coffee table to knees and stabs at inoffensive eggs. "Two sides to every story. I'm doing the other side, to balance all this shiny-happy 'we love mutants!' crap."
Well, dammit, if he's going to fucking stick around and fucking make her breakfast and fucking interrogate her - then she's going to stab the fuck out of those eggs (instead of his eyes) and trot out her standard journalistic pablum. Choke on it, you son of a bitch.
"Except the Friends aren't the /other side/, Canto," says Rossi with heavy-voiced reason, planting a hand on the sofa's back to lean. "That's like saying al-Qaeda's the other side of democracy. So tell me, how'd you get involved with the /Friends/?"
I liked the al-Qaida parallel, which I have now officially stolen for my own use. That's how it works in Cameronland.
Leah mutters, "The hell I will," and shovels breakfast into her mouth.
Tell him, that is. My writing isn't always clear to me, God knows. My brain doesn't always read the whole pose, see. It grabs interesting (or random) words and constructs a reply to them. Sad, really.
Wonders Chris, grim, "Why not? They got something on you, don't they? Who'd they target? Your family?"
Leah chews and swallows. She picks up her coffee and has a swallow. She puts the mug back on the table. She carves off another bite of eggs and downs it. She does not, under any circumstance, look at her interrogator.
Of course, her non-answer is an answer, and I don't think she even realizes it (because she's not as socially sophisticated as some of us are). She's unconsciously giving him confirmation because that's what she wants to do. Betrayed by her hidden desires!
"That's it, isn't it?" The coffee, forgotten entirely, lowers. Rossi's shadow pitches, creeping across Leah's back. "They're threatening your family."
"Don't be ridiculous," Leah says in a low voice as she stares at the coffee mug on the coffee table and eats her eggs. "You've seen too many movies."
Cf. the discussion above about how she's following a script in her head. Yeah. That hit home, Rossi.
The baritone says over a current of cynicism, "You mean the kind where there are superheroes and supervillains and people have magic powers?" Arms fold; Rossi stoops to lean over them, head dropping black and intimate over Leah's shoulder. His voice softens, quiet. "Welcome to New York City, 2005. We can get them into protection, Canto."
Leah's body shakes. Grimly she keeps eating. "Back off, Rossi."
Literally and figuratively (I keep using that construction a lot! Dammit): being so physically and verbally close is making it worse for her.
"All of them," says Rossi, cajoling, coaxing, the serpent at Eve's breast. His breath tickles her ear, stirring the sensitive hairs at her nape. Memories of tenderness, subverted to purpose. "Your mother, your sister -- you know they killed one of the cops at the Purity rally."
Bastard.
"One of my Uncle Jerry's boys. I know." Leah slides down the couch away from him. Her shoulders are still trembling, but she's still chewing eggs. "I went to the memorial service. It was nice."
I was, in a certain morbid way, proud of her there. She moved away, physically and verbally. She did not succumb. She coasted serenely through his bastardly attempts at manipulation. It's like growth or something. In a bad, broken way. Jerry is Jordy's twin brother, we've established, and he's also married to Ginnie, who's come up in a log before. Somehow, my brain keeps track of this information - better than it does RL people, in fact.
"I was there." Treacherous Chris, voice nudging against her awareness, stroking lightly at the threads of conscience and morality. Coffee-warmed fingers touch that line of throat, brushing into the pulse beneath the skin. "Lots of dead. I probably would've been one of them, you think? Friends' bullet, Brotherhood bullet -- what's the difference?"
Leah says flatly, "No difference. Dead is dead. Isn't that what you always say? I'll go to your funeral, too. Dance at your wake."
Now that she has her metaphysical legs under her, she turns his own words right back at him, like a slap in the face. You can die, Rossi, and I won't give a damn. Treat you like any other dead cop I've known. What a nice funeral, too bad about him, so sorry for the family - hey, are those ham sandwiches by the grieving brother? Great, I'm starved! Shorter form: Fuck off and die, Christopher. She is absolutely in a hateful, angry, bitter, tormented place, and everyone who tries to get close to her will suffer from her wrath at such temerity (when she's trying so hard to protect them by pushing them away! What gratitude!). Ain't psychology grand?
A pause. Unseen, a muscle jerks in Chris's jaw. "You really believe the shit the Friends believe in?"
Eggs are done. Plate's on the table. Leah picks up her coffee and walks away from him, to the windows, and stands and sips and looks out. "Someone has to speak for them," she says, still without inflection. "Are you really surprised?"
He's still getting to her, though, which is why she keeps moving away from him, even further away. It's easier to bullshit him (not the same as lying!) this way. Keep her distance. Keep that cool, slightly ironic aloofness.
"Yeah," says Rossi, frankly. "I am. I have a hard time believing you're that stupid."
Leah snorts into her mug. "No, you're not. You've never thought that much of me. I was Gabe's girlfriend, remember?"
A slip from professional into personal, with the introduction of dearling big brother Gabriel. She's not above snide attacks, and she does believe he thinks she's stupid, whatever he just said, which is why she lashes out and in that way: bring up Gabe, the abuser, the user, the manipulator, the high-minded asshole. She feels some petty superiority because she dumped him, triumphed over him, as even his brother couldn't do (as she also believes). A lot of overcompensating inferiority and poor self-esteem here.
"That was then. This is now. /Dammit/, Leah--" Frustration roils, slipping its leash for a moment. Is bitten back. Reason is the way to go. "Are you out of your fucking mind?"
With a calm look back at him, composed and wan, Leah sips coffee. "Maybe. Why do you care? Do your job or leave me alone. I told you already."
That's cold of her. I like it. I approve. Good characterization. Go, me! She got a reaction out of him; that's what she wanted, as payback for the shit he's putting her through.
Teeth show white. "Convenient peace and quiet," says Rossi, straightening to skirt around the sofa's edge and sink a hip on its arm. "Prefer not to have people pointing out that what you're doing is insane?"
Leah shrugs and returns to watching the day outside her apartment. "I don't care what they say. I'm doing my job, and I'm doing a good job of it. What else matters?"
Still cool, still cold. She's indifferent to this line of attack. She's retreated back to numbness and aloofness.
"They're /terrorists/, Canto," bites Rossi, temper flaring again to skew patience. "Fucking /terrorists/. They kidnapped the guy. --You could get thrown in jail for being an accessory to a crime, goddammit."
Leah swallows, but keeps her voice steady. "Well, then I will. Journalists have done time before, and maybe I'll get a great expose out of it. You never know! Gotta look on the bright side, Rossi."
Doesn't want to go to jail, no. Feels guilty about kindly, smart, wise, brave Dr. Grey (so much braver than she was in Tom's basement!). She's not a terrorist. She's not. Not not not! A return of the defensive sarcasm, and I thought about Judy Miller, but of course, this is AU Earth, so that mess probably didn't happen on XMM, without a Bush White House or a neocon-driven Iraq War to embroil the Times in journalistic prostitution for the purposes of jingoistic propaganda. Right?
Anger, rarely distant, fans itself hot in the green eyes. Deliberate, careful, Rossi plants his mug on the coffee table, out of reach. Out of use. "You're pissing me off," he informs, Brooklyn-harsh. "What is this bullshit? You're not this stupid. You're not this ... goddammit, you're not this /stupid/. Don't tell me you're just doing it for the money, because I've seen you turn shit away for fucking /principles/."
I could definitely feel the intimations of violence coming off him, like heat waves, so it's well that he put the cup down. We players are pp_ok with each other, totally carte blanche, and I was half waiting for him to hurt her, definitely. She'd just fight back, anyway. Maybe.
"It's damned good money," muses Leah as she breathes across the top of her gently steaming mug. "And I got to be on Larry King Live. Me. All by myself. Never had /that/ happen before. He's a nice guy, you know? Even if the suspenders are now and always have been and always will be entirely too much. Silly old man."
And oh, she might be tempting him to that edge, too. Hurt her. Punish her. Make her feel as bad in body as she feels in spirit. Penance. And vindication of what a terrible person she believes she is. Gratuitous Larry King mockery just because . . . well, because. It's Larry King, and it's gratuitous, and so frankly is he.
"Is it the fucking /fame/?" rasps Rossi, incredulous for a split second before belief, more terrible, sweeps it away. "That's what they got you with? Putting you in the spotlight, getting the offers, having the exclusive?"
Leah angles a beatific smile over her shoulder. "It's just delightful to hear how well you think of me, Chris. Maybe you should just leave me as your whore and have done with it."
A call-back to a scene with Tom, where she thought that about herself in the accompanying journal entry: that at least he hasn't made her his literal whore. She's wrapped up in her own drama, yes. She does appreciate the fame, too. It's seductive. More drama!
Again the muscle jumps, sharp-etched against the skin. "Nice try, Canto, but I've been related to Gabe longer than you've dated him. You're out of your league, if you're thinking of pushing me off. Tell me /why/."
Grimacing, Leah turns to sit on the sill. She daintily fluffs her robe across her legs and then sets the mug alongside her seat. "Or else?" she says, and some black memory whispers in her voice and peers out of her bleak eyes.
"Or else" is the crux of her relationship with FoH and Tom - more call-back, more echo. I like the dainty fluffing. Very ladylike. Contrasts. Juxtapositions.
Or /else/. Rossi straightens on a hasty jerk, and strides at Leah to slam his arm into the wall beside her. Temper roils, barbed; hurt crouches behind its shield, bleeding. "I don't want to end up taking you downtown, Canto. --Dammit, Leah. Tell me you're the victim here." Almost a plea.
He's getting close to the end of his rope. Give him something. Give him some reason to believe in. Something to make this make sense.
Leah looks up at him. A smile teases at her mouth. "You want to save me?" She runs a hand down his front, pensively watching fingers' glide, and looks up again. No smile now. "Knight in shining armor?"
God, I love that touch so much. It's not sexual; it's not even sensual. It's almost clinical: an assessment, or the recapitulation of some memory that might be all she's left with, if he goes away and never comes back. She's not mocking. Not much, anyway. Someone to save her? Yes, she'd like that very much. But she doesn't want it, either. Wants it, doesn't want it. Needs him, pushes him away.
"Fuck you," snaps Chris, bending into his arm -- into that hand's caress -- before catching her fingers in his. Squeezes. Gentles, with a forced press of will. "Tell me why you're helping them."
"I think," Leah says quietly but clearly, "that I should have an attorney present. I really do." She worms her hand free and presents both of them to him, wrists pressed together, waiting only for the cuffs. Her eyes are simmering, shimmering pools of old-leaf brown.
I love that move even more. (I blow my own horn!) Waiting to be cuffed. Such masochism. Such drama. I use "simmering, shimmering" (or the other way around) a lot. Too much. And other such rhymes. It's like all the repeated epithets and adjectives in Homer's poetry: placeholder shit your brain churns out automatically while you're trying to think of the next cool thing to say.
Chris stills. Regards her with shadowed, hungry eyes. "Don't do this."
Leah bites her lip. "I have to," she whispers. "Enough people have died, haven't they?" Her arms stay out, but they shake. They shake.
About as close to a confession as she's going to give and he's going to get. Take her. Punish her. She gives up (but she doesn't, she can't, she won't).
"They're threatening you," Chris murmurs back. Catches up one of those hands again -- binds its wrist with his strong, strong hand -- to press a desperate kiss against its fingers.
Blood trickles down Leah's chin. "I can't -- I can't talk -- Christ, Chris, you /know/ -- if I /say/ anything--"
Bit her lip. I did not bother to explicate that until a few poses down the line. Why? Because I was CAUGHT UP IN THE MOMENT. Deal. Such awful, naked intimacy and terror and need and hunger and hope here between them. Awesome-o. We write good people, not just characters. I'm proud of us.
"I'll help you," Rossi promises, reckless knight. Matching hurt catches at his breath; he drops to his haunches, a thumb warm and rough against the ribbon of red. "Don't do that. /Leah/. We'll put your family in protection--"
"No." Leah wrenches her head away from his touch, collects her hand again, hugs herself. "Chris, I can't say anything to you," she says to the dining table across the apartment, where she's looking and looking /hard./ "I can't, and I won't. Stop pushing me. Stop /pushing/ me!" Hysteria wends urgent through her voice, like the dribble of lip-bitten blood.
There we go: bitten lip, finally. (Lazy ass.) He's trying to reach her, to help her, and she's trying to push him away, and the strain of it all! She's not imaginative enough to go mad, fortunately, or she would do that by the end of this arc. Hysteria and the bleeding lip - Joelle. Dammit. I do need more diversity in my writing. Same old tricks, over and over again.
The green eyes chill behind the sweep of lashes, speculation (suspicion) sweeping across the apartment and its innocence. "It's okay, Canto," Rossi says in an abrupt about-face, dropping next to the woman to wind his arm around her shoulder. Reels in, determined. "I won't push. Look. I'm not pushing. Calm down."
Leah balls up her fist and pounds his shoulder. Just once, and softly. "Dammit," she despairs. "Why does everyone have to push? And push and push and-- I'm just doing my job! I'm doing my job! I'm reporting, and I'm getting paid for it, and I have new agents and a bodyguard and--" And hiccup. And tremors.
Hysteria, blah blah blah. The emotional climax has passed; it's all downhill from here. Boring. Heh. She's totally passing Nathan off as a bodyguard, too. Thinks she's clever (knows in her heart she's not).
"Just following orders," says Chris in grave, biting mockery -- and then remembers a second later and atones, apologetic. "I didn't mean that. Shh. Leah." Grudging compassion wraps its sheath around his voice, dulling its edge; the arm tightens, contracting into Rossi comfort, Rossi security. Quiet, subdued, he says, "I'm sorry. You know what you're doing, I guess."
Leah hits harder. "This isn't fucking Nuremberg," she snarls.
I found out later in the week that this scene occurred on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nuremberg trials. I had no idea.
"You're with a group that's talking genocide," Chris snaps back, unable, unwilling to hold his tongue. "Thin end of the wedge, Canto. You think-- never mind." And so much for comfort.
Leah shoves her head into his shoulder now. Canto stubbornness, Canto pigheadedness. "I'm not talking genocide. I'm not /with/ them. I'm /not./"
She is, and she knows it. I tried to match the name/trait repetition, but couldn't think of good words on the fly. Sometimes my well, it goes dry. (Oh, shit, I rhymed that. Sorry.)
"You're preaching their word," Rossi says grimly, (and so much for silence and understanding.) "You're /spreading/ it. Helping them look like reasonable people so they can shove the shit they do under the carpet. Kidnapping. Murder. A dead /cop/."
"I didn't kill a cop!" Leah wails softly.
That oblique accusation just kills her, even though she knows it's not true. Or fair. Damn him for using that on her. On her, of all people!
"You're an accessory to /kidnapping/," Chris reminds, bruising. "It's only a matter of /time/."
Leah breathes, "No," fervently, hotly, and whips her head through a negatory shake. "I had no idea what was going on with Dr. Grey. Before, during, after -- /nothing./ Any defense lawyer would have it thrown out of court for lack of a prima facie case. I'm doing my /job./" She clings to that, even as she clings to him.
"Negatory"? Really? Okay. I come up with words that I probably shouldn't sometimes. I don't edit poses; I brain-dump and hit enter. Not always the best policy in rp. She's still a bit hysterical here, but she's probably right about the prima facie: she was brought in ex post facto, she didn't plan or participate in the actual kidnapping, and so on. A good lawyer could get that thrown out, and she'd have access to the best, thanks to her new agents and their money and contacts, and it'd be a whole big stupid circus over nothing much, so let's just not even bother, right, criminal justice system? (This is how I justify her involvement with the kidnapping, because man, I do need logical reasons and ramifications because I don't want to godmode or Mary Sue this business. Any of it. Rp needs to make sense in internally consistent, real-world terms; otherwise, we might as well all go off and write happy fluffy bunny fanfic in our own little dream worlds. IMO.)
Chris squeezes, a little harder, a little fiercer: angrily, (protectively, possessively) -- "A /crime/," he says with bitter emphasis. "A harmless old guy who gets traumatized, whose family gets to be terrorized, just because -- what, exactly? You /knew/ the guy'd been kidnapped, you knew who had them. Why the fuck didn't you say something, Canto?"
Leah lifts her head and asks bitterly, "Who was I going to tell? You? Lazzaro? And watch you happy bastards plunge in where you shouldn't and get shot down for your noble pains."
I like "happy bastards." And mentioning Vincent! Hi, Vincent! How's it hangin'? That big shiny gun of yours, that is.
"God/da/-- Christ, Canto. What do you think this is, some kind of movie?" Exasperation hinges Chris's sweep up, the jerk of head that breezes black hair and flames the green eyes. "Believe it or not, the NYPD's got /people/ for this kind of shit. Give us a little credit for being professionals."
She cringes, but doesn't back down. "I'm not talking about it anymore." Leah stonewalls instead. Again; some more. "Give /me/ the same credit. It's my profession. It's my life. Things are quiet now, aren't they? So."
"It never stays quiet," says Chris, prophetic and far-eyed Cassandra. "So the rally's over. What's the next thing? Who's the next person they decide to shut up?"
Leah looks at him. "Me, probably."
She's expendable. She makes a move out of line, or she loses media access, or just fades in usefulness - they axe her. Quite possibly literally, with an actual axe. She has nightmares about that. (Ah, Cassandra. Poor girl.)
Rossi bruises in earnest, one hand convulsing around a wrist. "/Leah/."
A sob, twisted out of her like the last spoonful of water from a worn, dirty dishrag. "/Stop/ it. Stop it! Let me go, Rossi!"
What's with these physically abusive assholes in her life? Man! Grar! (Man grar!) As he notes in a later scene, she does bruise easily, and he does leave marks here. She's already high-strung, hysterical under the veneer of cynical calm, so the hurt just pushes her closer to the edge.
Belatedly realizing, muscles relax, manacles loosening and falling away: from wrist, from shoulders. "Do you have some kind of death wish?" Rossi demands, baritone cresting towards anger again, breaking past unease. "What the fuck is /wrong/ with you?"
Leah cradles her wrist and glares at him with rheumy eyes. "What, before or after a member of the New York Police Department assaulted me?"
Grar! Defensive-sarcasm grar! I think her death wish is past, but her psyche is so muddled and tortuously convoluted about itself right now, I really couldn't say for certain. It might come back, rising like swamp gas through the crevices of her poor broken brain. I like "rheumy." Need to remember to use it again. My vocabularly comes and goes, like the tides.
The green-eyed gaze settles like moth wings on Leah's wrist, fleeting and light, before swinging back to the woman's face. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," Chris breathes, making the names a curse -- and jerks upright to stalk away, punishing the floor for its mistress's failings.
Rossi's player used "moth" because I'd been wondering aloud why I'd used "spoonful" up there - because I'd been thinking about The Tick? We amuse ourselves and each other with little in-jokes.
Gingerly Leah resettles on the windowsill. She even picks up her coffee for a swallow (and a grimace: it's cooled by now). "Blasphemy suits you," she sends after him sarcastically.
The man's very body is an oath, carved out of obscenity and borne in profanity; he excoriates as he moves, snatching the discarded plate and fork from the coffee table to bear it into the kitchen. Things crash, slapping their sharp voiced protest into the sink. "You want a refill?"
Rossi's player writes better than I do. Have I mentioned yet this week that he's the best rp'er I've ever worked with?
"No." Leah rubs her forehead. Sounds tired. "I want to go back to bed and pretend this never happened."
"Bad dream?" asks the kitchen, falsely consoling. "The conversation? Or the Sinn Fein life? --You're not getting rid of me, Canto. I'm not Alyssa, or Melcross."
Leah says sweetly, "Or Gabe."
Bitch. Damn, Leah.
Something cracks in the kitchen. Water hisses. "Broke a plate," Chris reports, utterly without remorse. "Sorry about the fork. I'll bring some pliers by and fix it later."
Of course, he doesn't have to start smashing the crockery, now, does he? Jerk.
"No need. I have pliers. I even know how to use them. Failing that--" Leah shrugs and folds her arms over soft, terryclothed belly "--I have other forks. You wanna ruin more of my stuff, or maybe beat me up some more, go ahead. Do what you have to do, Rossi. It's all any of us can do."
Bitter, cynical mockery of hope. Yeah, she's doing what she has to do. She believes that because she has to.
Hidden in the kitchen, Rossi braces his arms wide and slouches between them, head hanging, eyes closed, temper mangled by anxiety. Water whines between them, counterpoint to his silence. "You're making me crazy," he says at last, bland and conversational again. "I can't figure out whether to beat some sense into you, or lock you in a closet to keep you safe."
Leah croons, "You love me."
I . . . think she might not be joking or mocking about that. Because of what he just said. That sounds like a declaration of caring from a Rossi, absolutely, and she could be projecting, too, since she's quite falling in love with him (again with the filling soul-holes and addiction neediness). Poor Rossi. I really felt for him in that pose: caught in doing the right thing, trapped and unable to make it make sense or make it better. For either of them, I suppose.
No answer. Another crack. "Broke your other plate," says Rossi, almost cheerfully. "I feel better."
"My poor plates. Don't make me come over there, asshole."
If I'm doing unattributed dialogue, you can assume that there's no particular inflection placed on it, and that's the case here. Leah doesn't care about her plates. Or about him. Except that she does because she's materialistic and in love with him. I hope I'm not the only one who finds such contradictions interesting. It's how people work! Seriously! But maybe it comes off as too cliché. I dunno.
"They were ugly plates." Heartless Chris. He eyes them thoughtfully; slaps a large fragment against the counter to splinter it in half again. Crash. Tinkle. "You sure you don't want more coffee?"
Leah growls a curse. "Will it make you stop breaking my shit?"
"It's already broken. Do you want more coffee?"
"Breaking more of my shit, then," Leah clarifies angrily. She huffs a breath. "God. Fine. Coffee, yespleasethankyoumisterdetective."
I don't think I've ever run words together like that. Ha. It's dorky, but what the hell. And stop breaking her shit, Rossi!
Detective Rossi stalks out of the kitchen like a rumpled heron, bright-eyed and beady-, coffee carafe in hand. Pours. Glowers at Leah. Stalks back. Announces from that increasingly fractured nest, "Beston's primary on the John Grey kidnapping."
Leah sips. "So he'll be throwing me into the box today. D'you think I have time to get dressed first? I don't want to force you guys to give up a great psychological advantage, but the weather does leave me a little cold these days. Hate to get sick."
Defense mechanism, yeah. She'd be fine with him dragging her down there in just her robe, why not, she's got nothing to hide, and isn't it a great metaphor, that, being naked in body and naked in truth and shining justice? Her defense mechanisms are always spring-loaded with traps, too: hurt other people before they can hurt her.
"Get dressed," Rossi suggests, over the thunk of plate portions being tossed in the garbage. "We're off until this afternoon."
"Thanks," Leah says and pushes off from the sill. Coffee mug goes on coffee table. Robe goes on couch. Naked woman goes in bedroom. And door? Door slams shut.
I like that sequence: methodical, logical, calm. She breaks down for a little in the bedroom. Damned if she'll show that to him.
The sink hisses a few moments longer, exploited for the cleaning of utensils. Chris emerges into the empty living room, leans into the door, and inspects the apartment again: in silence, in deep and hostile suspicion. Straightens. Glances towards the bedroom -- and then stalks out, sweeping the robe with him. Trade for the old newspaper, left glaring on the coffee table: Friends of Humanity Suspected in Cop Death. The door closes, leaving the apartment in relative peace. Quiet guilt. The echoes of argument.
Love that closing! Ambiguous notes of emotion. Beston did interrogate her later in the day, in full-on Disappointed Father-Figure mode. Rossi got kicked out of the room. Leah didn't say a damn thing to any of them and went home and got blindingly drunk.
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