OOC: commentary on Leah/Rossi post-Magneto scene (Part 2 of 2)
[Continued from Part 1.]
Green eyes shift, hunted. (Haunted.) "/Dammit/, Canto--"
Leah repeats quietly, "Asshole. Can't even give me that much, can you? I should've asked Magneto to finish the job he got interrupted doing in the park. --I didn't fall into fucking /bushes/, you simp."
Well. I didn't think she was going to tell him that, about the suicide attempt in the park. I guess when her dam breaks, it totally goes.
Chris inhales. Eyes burn. "I swear to God, I'm going to /kill/ you."
Sadly Leah stares at him, and then she twists out of his grasp and sits forward, away from him. "You are very difficult to love," she states with clinical dispassion marred only by the slight shake of her shoulders and dampened, deadened alto. "God knows why I try."
I just really like my character here. Excuse me a moment while I hug myself and feel proud and glad. She's not healthy, she's not right in the head, but she's trying. She's getting there!
"You fucking /lied/ to-- beat you to death with your own /leg/," Rossi exclaims through gritted teeth, muscle jumping a wild jig in the taut stretch of his jaw. Up, then, and away: into the slam of a wall, shoulder pitted to the plaster, and then bounced back to a hard stride back and in. "Why the /fuck/ didn't you tell me about the park?"
"Because you're blaming me for this shit!" Leah yells back. Her hands twist in white-knuckled balls on her thighs, but she doesn't get up. "You're blaming /me/ -- getting angry at /me/. I haven't done anything wrong! Mother of bleeding Jesus, Christopher: what if I got mugged? Huh? Or raped? Would you blame me for that, too? So goddamn mad you can't see straight, and it's the /vic's/ fault."
But that's the pose I really like. She throws his anger back at him for what it is, and she refuses to accept it as he might want her to, as indication of his caring. If he really cared, he wouldn't be yelling at her and blaming her. What the fuck, Rossi? What the fuck.
Glass splinters at the far end of Rossi's arm, swung wide to send a shelf's clock flying across the room. "--/Fuck/," baritone jags, raw and ragged -- and then he is done, arms splayed wide into the side table, head dropped and dragging.
"Like I said." Leah is deadly soft now, and still. "So mad you can't see straight. At me. I don't want to tell you a fucking thing, but I'm fucking in love with you, and I need my fucking head fucking examined for that, /damn/ you."
I enjoy swearing, as a lover of language, and my characters tend to follow suit. F-bombs away!
She's calm and level-headed here. She can't do anything about Magneto, Tom, and so on, but she can do something about Rossi . . . and goddammit, she is tired of coming to him for comfort, reassurance, and yes, love, and getting fucking violence in return. (The triggers, cascading in her memories, rising to the surface with slow, urgent catharsis-) If this is all he has to give her, she can un-love him. Just watch. She's not gonna put up with this treatment, not when she has mutants lounging around her living room and a crazed human with a motherfucking throne using her as his mouthpiece. Screw that, and screw you, too, Rossi. Grow the fuck up before she fucking leaves you.
Breath catches and tears, rent down the middle in frayed white fissures. The black head turns, blinded and unseeing, too far, too distant for sight. "I hate this," Chris says, harsh. "I /hate/ this. I hate that you're doing this. I hate that you fucking make me /feel/ like this."
Leah snarls, "I'm not a telepath. Can't /make/ you feel anything." She twists on the couch, slings an arm across the back, and glares at him over that barrier. "Guess what? You're doin' that all by yourself, loverboy. Can't control no one's reactions but your own. I got that from Psych 101 in school."
Oh, no, you're not going to try that little move on her, the classic statement of the abuser: You make me crazy, baby, you make me angry, I can't help myself, it's your fault for making me feel this way. You own up to your feelings and your reactions, Rossi, and don't you dare put them on Leah's back. Don't you dare. (Okay, so this makes me a little angry, too. Bear with me.)
I've known just as many New Yorkers who say "couch" as "sofa," and the former is what I grew up with, so I stick to it out of laziness. Rossi uses the latter. The difference distresses me in our scenes, and I guiltily think I need to conform to his usage, but then I never do. It's dialect! It's flexible! Whatevah! Whatevah! I do what I want!
"And you, going back to the Church, calling up Sabby, drunk out of your mind to talk about pushing away your friends--" Chris straightens, turning back to rest his hips against the table's edge; arms strut again, set and locked wide. "What do you call that, Psych 101?"
Blanching, Leah nevertheless rallies. "Idiocy, mostly, with a healthy dose of suicidal ideation and megalomania -- or maybe it's monomania. Been a few years, y'know. So I got Sabitha Melcross telling tales behind my back? Nice. Put her on the payroll. Every detective needs a fleet of informants, right? Maybe she can tell you when I'm fucking other guys, too."
Sabby, ouch. They're talking about her behind her back? Great. She has guilt and regret about her friendship with the other woman, and jealousy that she's still friends with Rossi (jealous that she, Leah, is not and cannot be friends with Sabby, that is; the Sabby/Rossi friendship doesn't trouble her). There's the subtle hint, or maybe not so subtle, now that I look at it, that Leah still doesn't think too highly of Sabby: she casts the younger woman as an informer, and police informers are often strung-out, wild-eyed, dirty druggies and whores. Attractive. Leah is in a hateful mood against everyone right now, you bet. Rossi's throwing too much angry energy at her; all she can do is try to throw it back and weather the storm without completely shattering.
For the record, I think it's both megalomania and monomania, but it's been a few years since my Psych 101 days, too.
The detective's lip pulls, contorting to a snarl. The ambsace of it tumbles through baritone, rattling into Brooklyn's table. "Yeah? You can't keep a secret to save your life. It's already out, Canto. Only people who don't know is your family. How long will that work, do you think? Family full of cops; you just hoping they'll go deaf, blind, and dumb?"
Ambsace. Our word. Oh, God, oh, God, I have love. It hails back to the days when I played a weaver on a game and Rossi's player had the arrogant desert lord who married her. Ambsace: double aces, the lowest throw of the dice, signifying bad luck or something of absolutely no value. Love.
Leah snorts her way to her feet, and her contempt sweeps up the chips of his words to add to her pot (the flash of hurt, of renewed despair in pallid eyes). "Worked so far, hasn't it? --Think I'll get my shower in a hotel, thanks. Or maybe go bang on Scott Summers's door, since he doesn't mind behaving like an actual human being towards me. Thanks," she says with poisoned sweetness, "for the offer, though. You're a real gent, Rossi."
He threw ambsace; she won and is prepared to leave the table with the pot. It hurts, though, that he'd snarl at her and throw in her face her poor acting, her bad facade, her family . . . damn you, Rossi. She throws Scott back at him, not out of a desire (or expectation) of making him jealous as a lover, but as a fellow officer of the peace. You can't protect me, Chris? You can't take care of me? I know a guy who can, and he's even one of those horrible muties. So much for you. Angry, hatred, hurt, shock, wounded love - she needs to get out of here before she loses it. Loses herself. And if she walks out that door right now, she is not coming back to him, I promise you that. Ever.
Chris's reply is a curse in their shared ancestral tongue -- language of artists, of philosophers, of lovers -- and another crash tips the table over, spilling files and paperwork across the living room floor. Over the couch, then, in a flying vault; Rossi swings across, a hand grabbing to grasp and hold. "--driving me /crazy/, Canto. For Chrissake. What are you thinking?"
So it was really nice of Rossi to stop her, snatching the relationship (and the prospect of future rp with these two) back from the brink. I informed xmm_rossi that Leah wasn't going to clean up that mess he just made. He accused Leah of not being a very good little woman. I said, "Duh."
A hard yank twists Leah's arm against his hold, but she can't break it, that gauntlet of black and blue strength, so she glares at him. Breathes low and hard. "Oh, you deign to admit that I might have /thought/ in my poor scared female head? Gosh, I could swoon right here and now." She yanks again, and nearly unbalances herself, requiring a reciprocal grasp on his other arm. It's not particularly gentle. Or lacking in the dig of shorn fingernails into his flesh. Her trembling transmits itself through that contact. "You need to stop blaming /me/ for how /you/ feel, you self-centered son of a bitch. How old are you, again? How many women have you driven away? I might be the last one you get, you know. The last decent one. I do, after all--" her head flags sneeringly (achingly) high "--/think/, as you said."
I have the vague memory that he liked that pose. I'm glad that one of us did. I like the individual pieces (the gauntlet that she's running and that he's holding her with, the word deign and the sarcasm, the repeated attempts to break free, and then the spiteful latching onto him, fingers and claws), but not the whole. It seems disjointed, not to mention rather more hurtful than it should be. I know where she's coming from, lashing out as she couldn't against Magneto or Tom and angry at her presumed lover's anger at her, but . . . beh. It's overkill. I'd like her to be nicer, even in a situation like this. That's my failing, however, not hers, so I'll get over it.
I'm not good with confrontations with characters and players I like. It's an old psychological kink of mine, and I dislike it intensely. Because of that kink and because of bad experiences on other games in the past, I fear that if my character is mean to someone else's, that player will be mad at me. Of course, the wise, intellectual part of me notes that if that were to happen, I would not only survive it, but realize from it that there's a player I should probably avoid in the future, as someone with worse IC/OOC bleed than I have. The rest of me sniffles and whines about wanting not to burn bridges, to have friends, to be nice because that's what girls are supposed to be. (Fuck you, socialization.) Knowing I have this hang-up, I've been slowly and cautiously trying to work through it with friends I trust. I've been pushing dramatic (and melodramatic) boundaries with the likes of Rossi and Scott because their players are generous with it and don't laugh at me for it. I'm retraining my brain; it's a good thing.
"Don't worry about it," rasps Chris, dragging Leah in to spite pain, to spite rejection, hands bruising on both arms to slam her against him. "I haven't seen you do it yet. What the hell do you want from me? You want Grossman, is that it? Sweetness and light? Fucking /rainbows/? Isn't it enough that you scare the shit out of me -- that what Magneto could do, what the /Friends/ could do to you -- makes me nuts? /Fuck/, Canto." Violence spins wild-eyed and savage-bright through the words; admiration (rage!) reels dervish-dizzy behind the eyes.
And it stills Leah, chills her instead of fanning her flames higher, and she tenses in his crush and gives him an upturned, white-turned face. "Are you," she asks shakily, "going to beat me now?"
The triggers finally cascade to her conscious mind - the memories that she's been . . . well, not repressing, but avoiding thinking about too systematically or clearly, yes. Rossi's anger, Rossi's implied violence, Rossi's insistence (unspoken and not) that it's for her good, out of caring for her - batten down the hatches. She's gonna blow.
Fury, that conflagration that feeds on everything, even thought, shakes Leah. "You unbelievable--" /Bitch/. Chris drops his head to hers, planting a feral, ferocious kiss.
Leah cries out against it and smacks him hard with the flat of her hand, against his head, his arm, whatever she can reach. She wrenches her mouth away, but only to turn it back on a scream of "No!" with her own eyes wild, hateful, terrified. "Not /again/, damn you! Leave me /alone/." With the last word, she pushes off from him, finally, and stumbles back against a chair, which shoves her to the floor in a graceless heap of hugging, quivering sobs.
She blows. She hits him back for that kiss like an attack (a fresh violation of her space and person), and then she gets away and collapses in cathartic release of a whole lotta shock and turmoil, both buried and new tonight. I like her scream. I hope Rossi's neighbors don't mind it.
Gods, I love that she fights back. I love you, Leah. Good for you. Good for you.
The blows rock Chris back, flesh meeting flesh in razor-edged smacks. Hand to cheek, hand to throat, hand to arm; he coughs, staggering back a step to find his lip with the back of his own hand. Split, again; bleeding, again, marked and marred with less love than Cassidy's. "/Shit/," he grits, leaf-sharded gaze blank across the check of blood. Anger flares, burns high another breath, then gutters and fades. In its wake: ashes. Weary, then. "Shit."
Rossi writes so pretty. And aw, first Sean fucks his shit up, and now Leah does. Man can't catch a break, can he? It's like he asks for it on some level, and one then wonders why he does.
Leah only cries harder, bent over herself on the floor. ". . . Again, again, again," chants ragged through her wracked breaths. "Oh, God, can't do anything right, again, again, again--"
She's still caught up in her own processing and release. I doubt she even hears him.
One last check for the lip and its upwell of blood, and then Chris is once more launched on obscenity, quieter, a mantra of heartfelt need without heat. "Canto." Apology, too late on the mark. He drops to a knee with a passing wince for old bruises; an arm wraps long and supple, pulling the woman towards warmth and regret. "Leah. Damn. I'm sorry. Christ, you piss me off so much-- /Leah/."
Her body is hard, taut, bony resistance through the soft layers of clothing and flesh. "No," Leah whines, shuddering and shaking and juddering with the ride of cathartic memory's passing. "Don't, Ken, please, not /again/ . . ."
Judder is an old word from an old rp partner, back and back in the past (c. 1995). I used it in her honor and to track the participles: shuddering, shaking, juddering. The two sh- alliterations and the -uddering rhymes to tie up the trio into an insistent, driving line. I do that frequently in my writing, you might have noticed, playing with alliteration, rhyme, assonance, and so on to span sentences or poses and tie them together. I used to write poetry; let's blame it on that.
Ken. Ah, Ken. Have I mentioned your name before on-camera? Perhaps not, and I'm too tired to go look now. He's been mentioned, though, obliquely a few times. Leah had a bad patch in college; she's talked about it briefly to Sabby, for one. It's come up in her journal entries, too. It's a time bomb I put in the character many, many months ago, although I wasn't sure when I was going to set it off, or how. Now and here seemed like the right circumstances. Leah's at her lowest, remembering when she really was at her lowest, and working through that, and working through more recent trauma, to purge herself in preparation for turning her back on the Friends and reaching towards life.
"It's not Ken," Chris says -- no catharsis for him, but katharos, purity of shame and its aloe, bitter against the tongue. The arm insists, tugging, like its fellow urging (coaxing) under the knot of body and quaking tremors. "It's Chri-- Leah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Look at me. I'm /sorry/."
"Ken?" Leah asks in a normal (if raspy) voice and peers up at him, baffled.
Rossi brings the Greek, which is why Rossi is my favorite player ever, ever, ever. We work so well off each other, and he's always driving us higher, farther, deeper in our prose. Kyrie eleison - God have mercy. I love you so much, man.
Leah's back out of the fog of release and aware of her surroundings again. She has no idea why Rossi is saying that name to her. Did she say it? Huh? What's going on? Ken? Oh, no . . .
"Chris," Rossi reintroduces, through broken lip and brow-clouded anxiety. A knuckle skims, a butterfly's touch against the plane of Leah's cheek. "You with me, Canto?"
Leah puts a hand over her mouth. Shadow shatters in her gaze. "I'm sorry. I -- I didn't mean to--" She swallows and looks away. "That was a long time ago. I'm here. I'm sorry. Silly little girl, cracking under the pressure. I know who you are, and you aren't him." Fulminating resentment does score him: "The violent kissing doesn't fucking help, though."
I have unreasoning fondness for the second sentence in my pose. I don't think it makes any sense at all, I think it's purple prose for the sake of purple prose, but I fucking love it. (I do tend, in general, to enjoy my writing very much, which is why I'll carp and bitch about sucking because I know I can do better and I disappoint myself. I really don't, though, when I'm thinking rationally. As occasionally happens. Shut up.) Her shadows shatter; she's seeing clearly again. There's light. Awareness. The child's gesture of putting a hand over her mouth, to capture words already long gone. She might also have been feeling nauseated, too. The aftermath of violent weeping can really leave you sick.
Fulminating, yay. An old, good word I haven't used in a while. I'm just pullin' 'em out of the air in this scene, aren't I? She does resent that he practically attacked her, but she's calm about it. Not to say she wouldn't and won't kick his ass if he tries it again, but she can think and talk about it more or less peacefully. (Asshole.)
"You split my lip," Chris advises, match point for match point, and redistributes himself to comfort: tailor's seat, under torso's tent. His hand opens, filling its palm with bronze-bright hair and sere cheek before falling away. Beyond turmoil, tired serenity ties Rossi's traces. "I said I was sorry."
Still Leah stares at a point away. "Fine. Maybe next time, you can skip the assault and not have to apologize."
Wouldn't that be nice? Isn't that reasonable of her? If you don't hurt people, you don't have to apologize to them. You save yourself the whole kit and caboodle!
She's refusing to give him eye contact again. She's sorting through what just happened, she's settling down, she's not going to reward him for the apology. Asshole. Again: if you don't hurt people, you don't have to apologize to them. It's nice that he does apologize, but maybe he can just skip the whole hurting part in the future, hm?
Blunted fingers touch the pad of mouth, drawing away daubed with blood. "Safer for both of us." Chris's tongue emerges. Tests. And then wonders, "Who's Ken?"
"Boyfriend in college." Leah's hands curl up on her folded legs; tension limns the cords in her neck. "Ran into me -- over me -- right after Dad died. 'Hey, baby, I'm sorry about your old man, here, try this, it'll make you feel /great/.'" She shoots a look of sad, sullen defiance at her detective. "Heroin."
I use limns probably once a week, no kidding. Love that word. And here we go with the story of Ken.
As much as I dislike IC confrontations for the fear of OOC fallout, I hate even more when I swing the spotlight onto my characters. I don't want to talk about them; I don't want to be the focal point of attention. I want to be Wayne Gretzky: taking more satisfaction from setting up a great goal than from making a great goal myself. I love assists. I love midwifing. I get twitchy and tetchy when it turns around to me in turn, even if I've asked for it (as I did with this scene, for Leah's development). It feels selfish of me. Greedy. Prideful. God, who'd want to sit and read about what my character has to say? Let's read about the other character instead! Much better!
I'm trying to get over that, too.
"You?" --but there is no surprise, beyond the shallow one that greets a new revelation. Black brows tug together. "He beat you?"
Leah tips her head in affirmation. The false casualness doesn't extend to relaxing the rest of her, however. "'Course, that was only when he wasn't stoned out of his mind on whatever new mix he cooked up in the bathroom of his shitty apartment down in the East Village. God, how I hated the smell of that place. But after a while, it smelled like home, or at least getting away from my family and memories and school and so on and so forth, so . . . whatever. You don't really feel a lot of pain when you're hooked on H, you know. You get used to it."
Bah. The first line of my dialogue is poorly written. Sentence goes on too long and has bad flow.
Leah was 19 when her father died of a heart attack on the job (he was a beat cop in Brooklyn, their home). She found out when she was at school. I can see it pretty clearly, actually: someone frantically looking for her in her class schedule, finally tracking her down in a lecture hall, and dragging her out to the nearest phone so she could talk to her mother. She listened calmly, said she'd be home as soon as she could, and hung up very carefully and precisely, her face as white as salt. She was so young then. She never had a chance against a smooth-talking, handsome jerk like this Ken. (She has reasons for distrusting and disliking Shaw!) He made her feel warm and safe and appreciated and all that shit, and he got her into heroin, and then it took him over and made him even worse.
She was the stronger of the two, but even if she didn't succumb to the drug, she did to the abuse. The use. She was in deep grief over her father, her grades were circling the toilet, she'd withdrawn from her friends and family (sound familiar? Our past habits are so deadly to our present and future) . . . she had Ken, and she had the needle, and at least she didn't feel much with them. Not feeling anything was nice. Surrendering to the flow of the world, even if it came with drugged blows (he never systematically beat her, but a punch here, a slap there). Easier than doing something. Easier than doing anything. Leah's good at giving up. She has practice.
"Yeah, I know," Chris says, he knows -- he knows! -- with the cynicism of his breed. Hands fist, arms press, pushing him, turning him to rest his back against the sofa's ribs. The dark head tips back, hair tousled as though by a too-garrulous wind. "How long were you with him?"
Sniffle. I'm sorry Leah's so talkative, but she's not blowing your hair back, for the love of Mike. Jerk. Of course Rossi knows what she's talking about. He's a cop; he's a detective. He's seen all that and more. She knows that. She trusts him.
"Long enough to get pregnant. Six months, give or take." Leah tilts into the side of the chair and studies the nearest leg of the coffee table moodily. "Got an abortion, of course. Got out of the relationship, too. Moved home for a while while I was cleaning up, and believe you me, Mom's been holding it over my head ever since." She snorts, falls silent and small and still again.
Not much to say there. It is what it is. She got even more conservative after those six months; it really set the tone of her adult life. She's pro-choice, but guilty about it. Sometimes she dreams, or thinks in the course of her day, about the child she could have had. She imagines it was a daughter. (I once told Jason's player that if he ever wanted to destroy her, he could illuse that lost daughter in a scene with Leah. That'd be horrible. And awesome! I may revisit the idea again, if he's willing.)
Mrs. Canto still rides Leah hard over that time. She feels that she failed in not protecting her daughter and has been correspondingly overprotective ever since. She nags her about settling down and getting married because she's already tempted fate (and angered God) once with the abortion. The longer she stays single and without kids, the worse it'll be for her come Judgment Day.
Leah and her mother are having a little chat over Christmas this year, let us say. I'll journal about it later.
The sated gaze, pitched up to the joint of wall and ceiling, widens a hair for that confession. The dulled baritone, less treacherous, picks up conversation's thread and knits it to his own. "Mothers. Can't kill them, can't stand them. Beston figures a family's just your starting point; you make your own once you're old enough. He should know," Chris tells his apartment with idle grievance. "Goes through wives like kleenex."
Leah says flatly, "Really don't want the change of subject right now, Chris. This is important to me, and you shuffle it off into cliches and jokes."
Not again, Rossi. Be straight with her. Give her respect. I can't fault his response here, either, and even Leah recognizes it, but . . . she's still vulnerable and bleeding in front of him. He could at least acknowledge that, dammit. Don't bring in Beston. Don't bring in outsiders (for John Beston is one, in this conversation). Be here, with her.
"No." Agreement. Or not. Chris rolls his head, studying Leah with a gaze dark and clenched, grasped like fingers around a bone. "I know. What do you want me to say? I'm sorry. You won't let me help you," he adds in a stab of bitterness, serrated to hook, to /pull/.
Well, he gets her back, doesn't he? These two just aren't good for each other. I don't know how much couples counselling it would take to make them good.
Tears spike Leah's short dark lashes. "But I do. I will. I want you to help me. I just don't know how to ask. Or what to do. Especially when you're yelling and blaming and hitting--"
She doesn't want to fight. She's had enough fighting. She's hit rock bottom. She doesn't know what to do. She doesn't even know where to start except to admit that helplessness and ignorance. Maybe that's enough of a first step. Maybe he can help her. (Leah has short eyelashes because Shaw has long ones. I approve of balance in my character set.)
"I'm /sorry/," repeats Chris, making of it both a profanity and a cry over black, roweled sincerity. "I don't know what-- my fucking temper. You make me crazy, Canto. You /do/. I know what to do, but I don't know how to...." The lean body drags up, straightening; an arm opens, stretching to invite Leah into sanctuary, that wholly illusory haven.
I wanted to hit him, myself, for that "you make me" talk. Sack up, Chris. Accountability. She's not making you feel anything, and the more you tell her that, the worse she feels: the guiltier, the uglier, the more horrible (Jezebel, succubus, temptress!). I smack you for my character because I know you don't know any better and because she's too tired to do it right now.
. . . The best she can do, perhaps, even as she's the best he can. So, after a long-spun moment, fragile (strong) as spider-silk, Leah lowers her head and crawls over to lean against him, into the curve of arm and warmth of her detective, her lover, her one true gamble. "Can we go to bed now?" she asks in exhausted tones. "I can shower in the morning. Media won't be able to find me there, after the story breaks."
More purple prose! Isn't it shiny? Ultraviolet, even. Leah is surrender-prone. She surrenders now, but - there's some strength in it. She does it because she chooses to. She chooses him, for all his faults and flaws. She's making her bed, and she'll lie in it with clarity of vision and understanding. This is who Chris Rossi is. And this is who she is: a surrenderer, but also a survivor. She will never again let someone hurt her the way Ken did, and that's why she turns against Tom after the next scene. That's why the scales fell from her eyes: he uses Nathan to hurt her, he abuses the both of them, and he is a bad, bad man. She will not be party to his evil anymore. She will be her own person, whoever that is, even if that means being a bigot and a genetic throwback (hi, Padraig!). Up yours, Friends of Humanity. Up yours, Brotherhood of Mutants. A plague on both your houses because she's got to put her own into order now.
He buries his face in that fallen halo, breathing in the scent of his reporter, his lover, his one true failure. "Yeah. Bed." To sleep, perchance to dream. Eyes close, lashes tangling with burnished strands; arms fold, concealing with futile will. "Leah, I don't just /say/ it. You know that, right? Every time I do, I get in trouble. Just because I can't say it, doesn't mean-- you get that, right?"
Ah, Rossi. You set off my triggers, never mind my character's, and yet . . . and yet. He tries to love her, and I do believe he does (because the player said so!), but I just don't know if they'll be able to find a path through these thorns. I doubt it, though I live in eternal hope.
Leah strangles a laugh into an uneven dimineundo against his chest. "Yeah," she says, and: "Yeah, I get that. Somehow, someway, I'll even find a way to live with it." Sighing, she climbs to her feet and extends a hand to pull him up, too, amid the spill of mess from his papers and her memories, her faith and his anger. She smiles, a soft and sad curve. "Maybe even find a way to live with you, and not kill you while I'm at it. Bed first, though. Then we can talk. About protection." Her smile twists, a bare bodkin's consummation, before her turn to the bedroom. Leading the way again, silhouetted against the door's black maw . . . and then gone.
Diminuendo for xmm_rossi's concert-pianist past (and it's a reference, even if only for me, to the Lymond books again; I can find the passage if you're interested), even if Google LIED TO ME ABOUT HOW TO SPELL IT and made me look foolish in front of the player. STUPID GOOGLE. (My bad, really. Even at four in the morning, I should be able to spell some things.) More purple prose; I haven't much to say about it because I don't much care for it. A nod to Hamlet, my favorite Shakespeare play, with the "bare bodkin's consummation" . . . and again she vanishes into a darkened room, as up in her apartment when she was getting her backpack and changing clothes. Here, she's silhouetted, she's light limned(!) against the darkness, and then she's gone into it. Because I'm a melodramatic freak that way.
I imagine that they went straight to sleep, exhausted and wrung out, but maybe there was sex in the morning: loose, lazy, blind lovemaking. And then she got kicked out so he could go to work and she could clean up her apartment. Because that's the way it goes with these two.
Can't believe I finally finished this damn thing. Now I need a nap. Goodbye.
[Commentary for X-Men MUCK. Please see the full list for more.]
Green eyes shift, hunted. (Haunted.) "/Dammit/, Canto--"
Leah repeats quietly, "Asshole. Can't even give me that much, can you? I should've asked Magneto to finish the job he got interrupted doing in the park. --I didn't fall into fucking /bushes/, you simp."
Well. I didn't think she was going to tell him that, about the suicide attempt in the park. I guess when her dam breaks, it totally goes.
Chris inhales. Eyes burn. "I swear to God, I'm going to /kill/ you."
Sadly Leah stares at him, and then she twists out of his grasp and sits forward, away from him. "You are very difficult to love," she states with clinical dispassion marred only by the slight shake of her shoulders and dampened, deadened alto. "God knows why I try."
I just really like my character here. Excuse me a moment while I hug myself and feel proud and glad. She's not healthy, she's not right in the head, but she's trying. She's getting there!
"You fucking /lied/ to-- beat you to death with your own /leg/," Rossi exclaims through gritted teeth, muscle jumping a wild jig in the taut stretch of his jaw. Up, then, and away: into the slam of a wall, shoulder pitted to the plaster, and then bounced back to a hard stride back and in. "Why the /fuck/ didn't you tell me about the park?"
"Because you're blaming me for this shit!" Leah yells back. Her hands twist in white-knuckled balls on her thighs, but she doesn't get up. "You're blaming /me/ -- getting angry at /me/. I haven't done anything wrong! Mother of bleeding Jesus, Christopher: what if I got mugged? Huh? Or raped? Would you blame me for that, too? So goddamn mad you can't see straight, and it's the /vic's/ fault."
But that's the pose I really like. She throws his anger back at him for what it is, and she refuses to accept it as he might want her to, as indication of his caring. If he really cared, he wouldn't be yelling at her and blaming her. What the fuck, Rossi? What the fuck.
Glass splinters at the far end of Rossi's arm, swung wide to send a shelf's clock flying across the room. "--/Fuck/," baritone jags, raw and ragged -- and then he is done, arms splayed wide into the side table, head dropped and dragging.
"Like I said." Leah is deadly soft now, and still. "So mad you can't see straight. At me. I don't want to tell you a fucking thing, but I'm fucking in love with you, and I need my fucking head fucking examined for that, /damn/ you."
I enjoy swearing, as a lover of language, and my characters tend to follow suit. F-bombs away!
She's calm and level-headed here. She can't do anything about Magneto, Tom, and so on, but she can do something about Rossi . . . and goddammit, she is tired of coming to him for comfort, reassurance, and yes, love, and getting fucking violence in return. (The triggers, cascading in her memories, rising to the surface with slow, urgent catharsis-) If this is all he has to give her, she can un-love him. Just watch. She's not gonna put up with this treatment, not when she has mutants lounging around her living room and a crazed human with a motherfucking throne using her as his mouthpiece. Screw that, and screw you, too, Rossi. Grow the fuck up before she fucking leaves you.
Breath catches and tears, rent down the middle in frayed white fissures. The black head turns, blinded and unseeing, too far, too distant for sight. "I hate this," Chris says, harsh. "I /hate/ this. I hate that you're doing this. I hate that you fucking make me /feel/ like this."
Leah snarls, "I'm not a telepath. Can't /make/ you feel anything." She twists on the couch, slings an arm across the back, and glares at him over that barrier. "Guess what? You're doin' that all by yourself, loverboy. Can't control no one's reactions but your own. I got that from Psych 101 in school."
Oh, no, you're not going to try that little move on her, the classic statement of the abuser: You make me crazy, baby, you make me angry, I can't help myself, it's your fault for making me feel this way. You own up to your feelings and your reactions, Rossi, and don't you dare put them on Leah's back. Don't you dare. (Okay, so this makes me a little angry, too. Bear with me.)
I've known just as many New Yorkers who say "couch" as "sofa," and the former is what I grew up with, so I stick to it out of laziness. Rossi uses the latter. The difference distresses me in our scenes, and I guiltily think I need to conform to his usage, but then I never do. It's dialect! It's flexible! Whatevah! Whatevah! I do what I want!
"And you, going back to the Church, calling up Sabby, drunk out of your mind to talk about pushing away your friends--" Chris straightens, turning back to rest his hips against the table's edge; arms strut again, set and locked wide. "What do you call that, Psych 101?"
Blanching, Leah nevertheless rallies. "Idiocy, mostly, with a healthy dose of suicidal ideation and megalomania -- or maybe it's monomania. Been a few years, y'know. So I got Sabitha Melcross telling tales behind my back? Nice. Put her on the payroll. Every detective needs a fleet of informants, right? Maybe she can tell you when I'm fucking other guys, too."
Sabby, ouch. They're talking about her behind her back? Great. She has guilt and regret about her friendship with the other woman, and jealousy that she's still friends with Rossi (jealous that she, Leah, is not and cannot be friends with Sabby, that is; the Sabby/Rossi friendship doesn't trouble her). There's the subtle hint, or maybe not so subtle, now that I look at it, that Leah still doesn't think too highly of Sabby: she casts the younger woman as an informer, and police informers are often strung-out, wild-eyed, dirty druggies and whores. Attractive. Leah is in a hateful mood against everyone right now, you bet. Rossi's throwing too much angry energy at her; all she can do is try to throw it back and weather the storm without completely shattering.
For the record, I think it's both megalomania and monomania, but it's been a few years since my Psych 101 days, too.
The detective's lip pulls, contorting to a snarl. The ambsace of it tumbles through baritone, rattling into Brooklyn's table. "Yeah? You can't keep a secret to save your life. It's already out, Canto. Only people who don't know is your family. How long will that work, do you think? Family full of cops; you just hoping they'll go deaf, blind, and dumb?"
Ambsace. Our word. Oh, God, oh, God, I have love. It hails back to the days when I played a weaver on a game and Rossi's player had the arrogant desert lord who married her. Ambsace: double aces, the lowest throw of the dice, signifying bad luck or something of absolutely no value. Love.
Leah snorts her way to her feet, and her contempt sweeps up the chips of his words to add to her pot (the flash of hurt, of renewed despair in pallid eyes). "Worked so far, hasn't it? --Think I'll get my shower in a hotel, thanks. Or maybe go bang on Scott Summers's door, since he doesn't mind behaving like an actual human being towards me. Thanks," she says with poisoned sweetness, "for the offer, though. You're a real gent, Rossi."
He threw ambsace; she won and is prepared to leave the table with the pot. It hurts, though, that he'd snarl at her and throw in her face her poor acting, her bad facade, her family . . . damn you, Rossi. She throws Scott back at him, not out of a desire (or expectation) of making him jealous as a lover, but as a fellow officer of the peace. You can't protect me, Chris? You can't take care of me? I know a guy who can, and he's even one of those horrible muties. So much for you. Angry, hatred, hurt, shock, wounded love - she needs to get out of here before she loses it. Loses herself. And if she walks out that door right now, she is not coming back to him, I promise you that. Ever.
Chris's reply is a curse in their shared ancestral tongue -- language of artists, of philosophers, of lovers -- and another crash tips the table over, spilling files and paperwork across the living room floor. Over the couch, then, in a flying vault; Rossi swings across, a hand grabbing to grasp and hold. "--driving me /crazy/, Canto. For Chrissake. What are you thinking?"
So it was really nice of Rossi to stop her, snatching the relationship (and the prospect of future rp with these two) back from the brink. I informed xmm_rossi that Leah wasn't going to clean up that mess he just made. He accused Leah of not being a very good little woman. I said, "Duh."
A hard yank twists Leah's arm against his hold, but she can't break it, that gauntlet of black and blue strength, so she glares at him. Breathes low and hard. "Oh, you deign to admit that I might have /thought/ in my poor scared female head? Gosh, I could swoon right here and now." She yanks again, and nearly unbalances herself, requiring a reciprocal grasp on his other arm. It's not particularly gentle. Or lacking in the dig of shorn fingernails into his flesh. Her trembling transmits itself through that contact. "You need to stop blaming /me/ for how /you/ feel, you self-centered son of a bitch. How old are you, again? How many women have you driven away? I might be the last one you get, you know. The last decent one. I do, after all--" her head flags sneeringly (achingly) high "--/think/, as you said."
I have the vague memory that he liked that pose. I'm glad that one of us did. I like the individual pieces (the gauntlet that she's running and that he's holding her with, the word deign and the sarcasm, the repeated attempts to break free, and then the spiteful latching onto him, fingers and claws), but not the whole. It seems disjointed, not to mention rather more hurtful than it should be. I know where she's coming from, lashing out as she couldn't against Magneto or Tom and angry at her presumed lover's anger at her, but . . . beh. It's overkill. I'd like her to be nicer, even in a situation like this. That's my failing, however, not hers, so I'll get over it.
I'm not good with confrontations with characters and players I like. It's an old psychological kink of mine, and I dislike it intensely. Because of that kink and because of bad experiences on other games in the past, I fear that if my character is mean to someone else's, that player will be mad at me. Of course, the wise, intellectual part of me notes that if that were to happen, I would not only survive it, but realize from it that there's a player I should probably avoid in the future, as someone with worse IC/OOC bleed than I have. The rest of me sniffles and whines about wanting not to burn bridges, to have friends, to be nice because that's what girls are supposed to be. (Fuck you, socialization.) Knowing I have this hang-up, I've been slowly and cautiously trying to work through it with friends I trust. I've been pushing dramatic (and melodramatic) boundaries with the likes of Rossi and Scott because their players are generous with it and don't laugh at me for it. I'm retraining my brain; it's a good thing.
"Don't worry about it," rasps Chris, dragging Leah in to spite pain, to spite rejection, hands bruising on both arms to slam her against him. "I haven't seen you do it yet. What the hell do you want from me? You want Grossman, is that it? Sweetness and light? Fucking /rainbows/? Isn't it enough that you scare the shit out of me -- that what Magneto could do, what the /Friends/ could do to you -- makes me nuts? /Fuck/, Canto." Violence spins wild-eyed and savage-bright through the words; admiration (rage!) reels dervish-dizzy behind the eyes.
And it stills Leah, chills her instead of fanning her flames higher, and she tenses in his crush and gives him an upturned, white-turned face. "Are you," she asks shakily, "going to beat me now?"
The triggers finally cascade to her conscious mind - the memories that she's been . . . well, not repressing, but avoiding thinking about too systematically or clearly, yes. Rossi's anger, Rossi's implied violence, Rossi's insistence (unspoken and not) that it's for her good, out of caring for her - batten down the hatches. She's gonna blow.
Fury, that conflagration that feeds on everything, even thought, shakes Leah. "You unbelievable--" /Bitch/. Chris drops his head to hers, planting a feral, ferocious kiss.
Leah cries out against it and smacks him hard with the flat of her hand, against his head, his arm, whatever she can reach. She wrenches her mouth away, but only to turn it back on a scream of "No!" with her own eyes wild, hateful, terrified. "Not /again/, damn you! Leave me /alone/." With the last word, she pushes off from him, finally, and stumbles back against a chair, which shoves her to the floor in a graceless heap of hugging, quivering sobs.
She blows. She hits him back for that kiss like an attack (a fresh violation of her space and person), and then she gets away and collapses in cathartic release of a whole lotta shock and turmoil, both buried and new tonight. I like her scream. I hope Rossi's neighbors don't mind it.
Gods, I love that she fights back. I love you, Leah. Good for you. Good for you.
The blows rock Chris back, flesh meeting flesh in razor-edged smacks. Hand to cheek, hand to throat, hand to arm; he coughs, staggering back a step to find his lip with the back of his own hand. Split, again; bleeding, again, marked and marred with less love than Cassidy's. "/Shit/," he grits, leaf-sharded gaze blank across the check of blood. Anger flares, burns high another breath, then gutters and fades. In its wake: ashes. Weary, then. "Shit."
Rossi writes so pretty. And aw, first Sean fucks his shit up, and now Leah does. Man can't catch a break, can he? It's like he asks for it on some level, and one then wonders why he does.
Leah only cries harder, bent over herself on the floor. ". . . Again, again, again," chants ragged through her wracked breaths. "Oh, God, can't do anything right, again, again, again--"
She's still caught up in her own processing and release. I doubt she even hears him.
One last check for the lip and its upwell of blood, and then Chris is once more launched on obscenity, quieter, a mantra of heartfelt need without heat. "Canto." Apology, too late on the mark. He drops to a knee with a passing wince for old bruises; an arm wraps long and supple, pulling the woman towards warmth and regret. "Leah. Damn. I'm sorry. Christ, you piss me off so much-- /Leah/."
Her body is hard, taut, bony resistance through the soft layers of clothing and flesh. "No," Leah whines, shuddering and shaking and juddering with the ride of cathartic memory's passing. "Don't, Ken, please, not /again/ . . ."
Judder is an old word from an old rp partner, back and back in the past (c. 1995). I used it in her honor and to track the participles: shuddering, shaking, juddering. The two sh- alliterations and the -uddering rhymes to tie up the trio into an insistent, driving line. I do that frequently in my writing, you might have noticed, playing with alliteration, rhyme, assonance, and so on to span sentences or poses and tie them together. I used to write poetry; let's blame it on that.
Ken. Ah, Ken. Have I mentioned your name before on-camera? Perhaps not, and I'm too tired to go look now. He's been mentioned, though, obliquely a few times. Leah had a bad patch in college; she's talked about it briefly to Sabby, for one. It's come up in her journal entries, too. It's a time bomb I put in the character many, many months ago, although I wasn't sure when I was going to set it off, or how. Now and here seemed like the right circumstances. Leah's at her lowest, remembering when she really was at her lowest, and working through that, and working through more recent trauma, to purge herself in preparation for turning her back on the Friends and reaching towards life.
"It's not Ken," Chris says -- no catharsis for him, but katharos, purity of shame and its aloe, bitter against the tongue. The arm insists, tugging, like its fellow urging (coaxing) under the knot of body and quaking tremors. "It's Chri-- Leah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Look at me. I'm /sorry/."
"Ken?" Leah asks in a normal (if raspy) voice and peers up at him, baffled.
Rossi brings the Greek, which is why Rossi is my favorite player ever, ever, ever. We work so well off each other, and he's always driving us higher, farther, deeper in our prose. Kyrie eleison - God have mercy. I love you so much, man.
Leah's back out of the fog of release and aware of her surroundings again. She has no idea why Rossi is saying that name to her. Did she say it? Huh? What's going on? Ken? Oh, no . . .
"Chris," Rossi reintroduces, through broken lip and brow-clouded anxiety. A knuckle skims, a butterfly's touch against the plane of Leah's cheek. "You with me, Canto?"
Leah puts a hand over her mouth. Shadow shatters in her gaze. "I'm sorry. I -- I didn't mean to--" She swallows and looks away. "That was a long time ago. I'm here. I'm sorry. Silly little girl, cracking under the pressure. I know who you are, and you aren't him." Fulminating resentment does score him: "The violent kissing doesn't fucking help, though."
I have unreasoning fondness for the second sentence in my pose. I don't think it makes any sense at all, I think it's purple prose for the sake of purple prose, but I fucking love it. (I do tend, in general, to enjoy my writing very much, which is why I'll carp and bitch about sucking because I know I can do better and I disappoint myself. I really don't, though, when I'm thinking rationally. As occasionally happens. Shut up.) Her shadows shatter; she's seeing clearly again. There's light. Awareness. The child's gesture of putting a hand over her mouth, to capture words already long gone. She might also have been feeling nauseated, too. The aftermath of violent weeping can really leave you sick.
Fulminating, yay. An old, good word I haven't used in a while. I'm just pullin' 'em out of the air in this scene, aren't I? She does resent that he practically attacked her, but she's calm about it. Not to say she wouldn't and won't kick his ass if he tries it again, but she can think and talk about it more or less peacefully. (Asshole.)
"You split my lip," Chris advises, match point for match point, and redistributes himself to comfort: tailor's seat, under torso's tent. His hand opens, filling its palm with bronze-bright hair and sere cheek before falling away. Beyond turmoil, tired serenity ties Rossi's traces. "I said I was sorry."
Still Leah stares at a point away. "Fine. Maybe next time, you can skip the assault and not have to apologize."
Wouldn't that be nice? Isn't that reasonable of her? If you don't hurt people, you don't have to apologize to them. You save yourself the whole kit and caboodle!
She's refusing to give him eye contact again. She's sorting through what just happened, she's settling down, she's not going to reward him for the apology. Asshole. Again: if you don't hurt people, you don't have to apologize to them. It's nice that he does apologize, but maybe he can just skip the whole hurting part in the future, hm?
Blunted fingers touch the pad of mouth, drawing away daubed with blood. "Safer for both of us." Chris's tongue emerges. Tests. And then wonders, "Who's Ken?"
"Boyfriend in college." Leah's hands curl up on her folded legs; tension limns the cords in her neck. "Ran into me -- over me -- right after Dad died. 'Hey, baby, I'm sorry about your old man, here, try this, it'll make you feel /great/.'" She shoots a look of sad, sullen defiance at her detective. "Heroin."
I use limns probably once a week, no kidding. Love that word. And here we go with the story of Ken.
As much as I dislike IC confrontations for the fear of OOC fallout, I hate even more when I swing the spotlight onto my characters. I don't want to talk about them; I don't want to be the focal point of attention. I want to be Wayne Gretzky: taking more satisfaction from setting up a great goal than from making a great goal myself. I love assists. I love midwifing. I get twitchy and tetchy when it turns around to me in turn, even if I've asked for it (as I did with this scene, for Leah's development). It feels selfish of me. Greedy. Prideful. God, who'd want to sit and read about what my character has to say? Let's read about the other character instead! Much better!
I'm trying to get over that, too.
"You?" --but there is no surprise, beyond the shallow one that greets a new revelation. Black brows tug together. "He beat you?"
Leah tips her head in affirmation. The false casualness doesn't extend to relaxing the rest of her, however. "'Course, that was only when he wasn't stoned out of his mind on whatever new mix he cooked up in the bathroom of his shitty apartment down in the East Village. God, how I hated the smell of that place. But after a while, it smelled like home, or at least getting away from my family and memories and school and so on and so forth, so . . . whatever. You don't really feel a lot of pain when you're hooked on H, you know. You get used to it."
Bah. The first line of my dialogue is poorly written. Sentence goes on too long and has bad flow.
Leah was 19 when her father died of a heart attack on the job (he was a beat cop in Brooklyn, their home). She found out when she was at school. I can see it pretty clearly, actually: someone frantically looking for her in her class schedule, finally tracking her down in a lecture hall, and dragging her out to the nearest phone so she could talk to her mother. She listened calmly, said she'd be home as soon as she could, and hung up very carefully and precisely, her face as white as salt. She was so young then. She never had a chance against a smooth-talking, handsome jerk like this Ken. (She has reasons for distrusting and disliking Shaw!) He made her feel warm and safe and appreciated and all that shit, and he got her into heroin, and then it took him over and made him even worse.
She was the stronger of the two, but even if she didn't succumb to the drug, she did to the abuse. The use. She was in deep grief over her father, her grades were circling the toilet, she'd withdrawn from her friends and family (sound familiar? Our past habits are so deadly to our present and future) . . . she had Ken, and she had the needle, and at least she didn't feel much with them. Not feeling anything was nice. Surrendering to the flow of the world, even if it came with drugged blows (he never systematically beat her, but a punch here, a slap there). Easier than doing something. Easier than doing anything. Leah's good at giving up. She has practice.
"Yeah, I know," Chris says, he knows -- he knows! -- with the cynicism of his breed. Hands fist, arms press, pushing him, turning him to rest his back against the sofa's ribs. The dark head tips back, hair tousled as though by a too-garrulous wind. "How long were you with him?"
Sniffle. I'm sorry Leah's so talkative, but she's not blowing your hair back, for the love of Mike. Jerk. Of course Rossi knows what she's talking about. He's a cop; he's a detective. He's seen all that and more. She knows that. She trusts him.
"Long enough to get pregnant. Six months, give or take." Leah tilts into the side of the chair and studies the nearest leg of the coffee table moodily. "Got an abortion, of course. Got out of the relationship, too. Moved home for a while while I was cleaning up, and believe you me, Mom's been holding it over my head ever since." She snorts, falls silent and small and still again.
Not much to say there. It is what it is. She got even more conservative after those six months; it really set the tone of her adult life. She's pro-choice, but guilty about it. Sometimes she dreams, or thinks in the course of her day, about the child she could have had. She imagines it was a daughter. (I once told Jason's player that if he ever wanted to destroy her, he could illuse that lost daughter in a scene with Leah. That'd be horrible. And awesome! I may revisit the idea again, if he's willing.)
Mrs. Canto still rides Leah hard over that time. She feels that she failed in not protecting her daughter and has been correspondingly overprotective ever since. She nags her about settling down and getting married because she's already tempted fate (and angered God) once with the abortion. The longer she stays single and without kids, the worse it'll be for her come Judgment Day.
Leah and her mother are having a little chat over Christmas this year, let us say. I'll journal about it later.
The sated gaze, pitched up to the joint of wall and ceiling, widens a hair for that confession. The dulled baritone, less treacherous, picks up conversation's thread and knits it to his own. "Mothers. Can't kill them, can't stand them. Beston figures a family's just your starting point; you make your own once you're old enough. He should know," Chris tells his apartment with idle grievance. "Goes through wives like kleenex."
Leah says flatly, "Really don't want the change of subject right now, Chris. This is important to me, and you shuffle it off into cliches and jokes."
Not again, Rossi. Be straight with her. Give her respect. I can't fault his response here, either, and even Leah recognizes it, but . . . she's still vulnerable and bleeding in front of him. He could at least acknowledge that, dammit. Don't bring in Beston. Don't bring in outsiders (for John Beston is one, in this conversation). Be here, with her.
"No." Agreement. Or not. Chris rolls his head, studying Leah with a gaze dark and clenched, grasped like fingers around a bone. "I know. What do you want me to say? I'm sorry. You won't let me help you," he adds in a stab of bitterness, serrated to hook, to /pull/.
Well, he gets her back, doesn't he? These two just aren't good for each other. I don't know how much couples counselling it would take to make them good.
Tears spike Leah's short dark lashes. "But I do. I will. I want you to help me. I just don't know how to ask. Or what to do. Especially when you're yelling and blaming and hitting--"
She doesn't want to fight. She's had enough fighting. She's hit rock bottom. She doesn't know what to do. She doesn't even know where to start except to admit that helplessness and ignorance. Maybe that's enough of a first step. Maybe he can help her. (Leah has short eyelashes because Shaw has long ones. I approve of balance in my character set.)
"I'm /sorry/," repeats Chris, making of it both a profanity and a cry over black, roweled sincerity. "I don't know what-- my fucking temper. You make me crazy, Canto. You /do/. I know what to do, but I don't know how to...." The lean body drags up, straightening; an arm opens, stretching to invite Leah into sanctuary, that wholly illusory haven.
I wanted to hit him, myself, for that "you make me" talk. Sack up, Chris. Accountability. She's not making you feel anything, and the more you tell her that, the worse she feels: the guiltier, the uglier, the more horrible (Jezebel, succubus, temptress!). I smack you for my character because I know you don't know any better and because she's too tired to do it right now.
. . . The best she can do, perhaps, even as she's the best he can. So, after a long-spun moment, fragile (strong) as spider-silk, Leah lowers her head and crawls over to lean against him, into the curve of arm and warmth of her detective, her lover, her one true gamble. "Can we go to bed now?" she asks in exhausted tones. "I can shower in the morning. Media won't be able to find me there, after the story breaks."
More purple prose! Isn't it shiny? Ultraviolet, even. Leah is surrender-prone. She surrenders now, but - there's some strength in it. She does it because she chooses to. She chooses him, for all his faults and flaws. She's making her bed, and she'll lie in it with clarity of vision and understanding. This is who Chris Rossi is. And this is who she is: a surrenderer, but also a survivor. She will never again let someone hurt her the way Ken did, and that's why she turns against Tom after the next scene. That's why the scales fell from her eyes: he uses Nathan to hurt her, he abuses the both of them, and he is a bad, bad man. She will not be party to his evil anymore. She will be her own person, whoever that is, even if that means being a bigot and a genetic throwback (hi, Padraig!). Up yours, Friends of Humanity. Up yours, Brotherhood of Mutants. A plague on both your houses because she's got to put her own into order now.
He buries his face in that fallen halo, breathing in the scent of his reporter, his lover, his one true failure. "Yeah. Bed." To sleep, perchance to dream. Eyes close, lashes tangling with burnished strands; arms fold, concealing with futile will. "Leah, I don't just /say/ it. You know that, right? Every time I do, I get in trouble. Just because I can't say it, doesn't mean-- you get that, right?"
Ah, Rossi. You set off my triggers, never mind my character's, and yet . . . and yet. He tries to love her, and I do believe he does (because the player said so!), but I just don't know if they'll be able to find a path through these thorns. I doubt it, though I live in eternal hope.
Leah strangles a laugh into an uneven dimineundo against his chest. "Yeah," she says, and: "Yeah, I get that. Somehow, someway, I'll even find a way to live with it." Sighing, she climbs to her feet and extends a hand to pull him up, too, amid the spill of mess from his papers and her memories, her faith and his anger. She smiles, a soft and sad curve. "Maybe even find a way to live with you, and not kill you while I'm at it. Bed first, though. Then we can talk. About protection." Her smile twists, a bare bodkin's consummation, before her turn to the bedroom. Leading the way again, silhouetted against the door's black maw . . . and then gone.
Diminuendo for xmm_rossi's concert-pianist past (and it's a reference, even if only for me, to the Lymond books again; I can find the passage if you're interested), even if Google LIED TO ME ABOUT HOW TO SPELL IT and made me look foolish in front of the player. STUPID GOOGLE. (My bad, really. Even at four in the morning, I should be able to spell some things.) More purple prose; I haven't much to say about it because I don't much care for it. A nod to Hamlet, my favorite Shakespeare play, with the "bare bodkin's consummation" . . . and again she vanishes into a darkened room, as up in her apartment when she was getting her backpack and changing clothes. Here, she's silhouetted, she's light limned(!) against the darkness, and then she's gone into it. Because I'm a melodramatic freak that way.
I imagine that they went straight to sleep, exhausted and wrung out, but maybe there was sex in the morning: loose, lazy, blind lovemaking. And then she got kicked out so he could go to work and she could clean up her apartment. Because that's the way it goes with these two.
Can't believe I finally finished this damn thing. Now I need a nap. Goodbye.
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