Leonardo; Magneto
Every time I leave I am reminded of why I should not go back. I am not certain how much more clearly he could say that he does not wish me there. Or to be /worried/. I could have very well waited until my next meeting with Adel al Razi and asked after the situation then. Clearly, I /should/ have.
I honestly wonder how Leonardo Maxwell manages to perform daily tasks, so great is his stupidity. He puts me in an exceedingly foul mood. At the moment, I even miss Victor. At least if he were here, I would have options to work out the mood. Disguise is, at times, very, very tiresome.
11/17/2007
=NYC= East Village - Manhattan
East Village would seem, by name, to be an extension of the arty Greenwich Village and this is precisely what the developers would like you to think. But East Village's spirit is closer to that of Lower East Side. East Village's spirit is that of the punk, the restrained (and unrestrained) riot, the beat poet turned homeless and angry. And some of those ragged street walkers indeed have nowhere to sleep.
East Village /is/, in the end, arty and experimental, but with an edge of drugs and desperation. If also the kind of free thought and frenetic drive that spark cultural revolution.
It's evening, and this particular street is fairly quiet other than the cars going by and the occasional person walking home late from work. Leonardo happens to be coming from Purgatory, wobbling down the street with breath smelling of wine. "I feel much better now, and I avoided getting drunk." he says to the hand held in front of his face.
Elizabeth is not coming from Purgatory. Where, exactly, she /is/ coming from is not clear, although her clothing is still businesslike and neat, but that much at least is certain. Her head is lowered a touch as she hurries her way through the brisk chill, although she is not, at least, obscuring her vision with a hand held in front of her.
Leonardo keeps walking along, and when he removes the hand, he's about to walk right into Elizabeth, too drunk and mentally distracted to notice.
Elizabeth , on the other hand, is not. Her head jerks up and she stops short just in time to miss Leonardo, although she does not sidestep - if he keeps going, he'll keep going right into her. "/Excuse/ me," she says sharply.
Leonardo stops, almost falling. Unlike when she first saw him, he looks like a mixture of exhausted and laid back, and if she nudged him he'd very likely fall over. "Sorry about that. Hey, you're the Friends woman." he notices as he eyes linger to buildings and objects, but eventually make their way back to her. The other thing different from their first meeting are the lack of contractions in his speech. "We don't gotta be enemies, ya know."
"Leonardo Maxwell," Elizabeth notes with clear distaste. She takes a step backwards, distancing herself as her chin edges up. "You are an idiot and apparently a drunk."
"I'm tired of people calling me an idiot, I do my best ya know..." Leonardo says with a hurt look on his face, staring down at the ground inbetween her feet. "You don't have to sic the rest of your Friends on me anymore, I'm not looking for Magneto any longer, he's an ass. And I'm not drunk."
"Your best is clearly inadequete for any reasonable person." Disdain is not, we must note, hidden in the least.
"I learned from my mistakes, this wise woman gave me advice, I don't need anyone but myself." Leonardo declares in his sternly emo tone. "I'm a human, why are you so against me?"
"You aren't fooling anyone, you know." Elizabeth's brows shoot up as her fingers tighten irritably on the strap of her briefcase.
"There's nothing mutant about me! Do I look mutant to you?" Leonardo asks, forgetting about his hair due to his intoxication. "Being a mutant would be too hard."
"Do I look Friends of Humanity to you?" Elizabeth retorts before narrowing her eyes sharply on Leonardo. "You've seen Magneto?"
"Why would I tell you that?" Leonardo asks with an eyebrow raised as if she were crazy. "I already told you that I think you're a part of Friends, we're out here in the middle of the night, I'm not oblivious to what a woman can do to a guy if she's determined, or has a gun."
Elizabeth's spine stiffens slightly as she stares at Leonardo, lips pressed into a thin line. "Tell me," she encourages darkly. "What /can/ a woman do?"
"Beat me up, break my bones, shoot me, pull out a knife and stab me, taser me, mace me, should I go on?" Leonardo lists seriously, holding his head dizzily for a moment. "So the last thing I would tell you is that I met Magneto the other day."
"And yet you do."
"What are you talking about?" Leonardo asks in a confused wince. "Why are you always asking me questions? Lying to the police with Friends propaganda is not enough to get a so called 'dangerous mutant' arrested, they would have to do a blood test, and your argument would be blown out of the water."
"And you are so very baffled as to why everyone keeps calling you an idiot." Elizabeth's voice thickens with scorn as her gaze rakes across him, and then she steps swiftly past him to continue on her way.
"I'm not!" Leonardo yells in a drunken rage and one car after another's alarms go off, but nothing else of note. Then he just starts walking away from her, stumbling, and throwing up on the ground before continuing on his way.
Leonardo is drunk. Mystique is not happy.
=NYC= Erik's Apartment - Archstone Westbury - Apartments in the Sky
Still new, this apartment is furnished but sparsely decorated. There is a great deal of color over fresh wooden flooring. Most of the furniture is black! The walls in the living room are a matte scarlet. Yay! There is a large moose standing in the living room. It says someone was hunting it.
The flat above Stvol's does not really look occupied. There is a couch, and a refrigerator, and a small television situated atop a crate, but there is little in the way of personal belongings. There are no notes littered across the rickety kitchen table, and there is no food in the cabinets or on the counter. But Erik is her, semi-relaxed in a blazer and blue jeans with the evening news on mute and a copy of the times open between his knees.
*here.
Tabs kept on the Master of Magnetism make him easy to locate, even in his somewhat less pleasant digs. For this visit, Mystique has abandoned Elizabeth in favor of another raven-haired beauty with thin lips and a sharp jawline. Her fist knocks once, twice against the door, and then she drops her hand to the knob.
That is unusual. His eyes lifted from the paper at the knock, Erik pauses a moment before folding back to the front page to squint at the date. The sixteenth. Rent is not even remotely due. Mulling over this, he remains seated for a good minute before he folds the paper aside and pushes to his feet to move quietly for the (locked) door.
Outside the door, Mystique tries the knob and then pulls her hand back, frowning in disappointment as it fails to open to her whims. For a moment she considers simply picking the lock, but intention is apparently not strong enough to urge the effort.
Padded footfalls drawn to a slow halt on the opposite side of the door, Erik stands and listens, for what it is worth. There is no peep hole, and his curiosity is such that he cannot simply ignore whoever may be here to harass him. Perhaps it is a drunk person. "Who is there?" he demands finally, in gruff Russian.
Mystique is not drunk, although she is greatly considering it. Her head tilts slightly at the sound of footsteps, and the blunt cut of her hair falls against the line of her jaw. Her fingers curve lightly into her palms. "Open the door, Erik."
Not the reply he was anticipating. Brows falling a bit, the door unlocks itself, and he reaches to open it without further question.
Mystique has, in the meantime, reached for the knob again, and the combined force of push and pull sends it swinging toward Erik a bit too hard. Oops.
Thump. Erik has reflexes enough to stop the door with his shoulder rather than with his forehead, but not enough to get out of the way.
Frustration seeps clearly from Mystique's every pore, and it is in no way lessened by Erik's pitiful reflexes. She fixes him with a Look and moves to brush past him into the apartment proper without another word.
Expression an awkward, muddled blank, Erik skews his brows away from her Look and leans the close the door after her in silence before he reaches up to rub at his shoulder. "Evening."
"What a lovely place, Erik," Mystique notes, taking in the place with a fast sweep of her gaze. "You're moving up in the world. I imagine you could get drunk merely by inhaling the fumes that rise up from Stvols."
Magneto, who is quite sober, levels his brows at that. "And you are as charming as ever." More than accusation, his tone has an odd hint of observation to it, rather as if he's had some suspicion or another confirmed.
Mystique's lips twist as she pauses halfway through the living area and glances over her shoulder at him. There is a long moment's silence as she studies him, eyes a brilliant ice blue.
His own eyes holding steady at a chilly shade of slate in the warm light that floods the living area from a single lamp, Erik studies her back, still positioned near the door.
Apparently not finding whatever she was looking for, Mystique turns forward again and draws in a single, deep breath. "I encountered Leonardo Maxwell again today," she informs him briskly.
His bristled jaw worked in muted frustration when her attention has turned away, Erik pulls in a steadying breath before he paces the few steps required to take him back to the couch. "He seems your type."
Mystique's eyes snap back to Erik, dark brows shooting up.
Apparently assuming that his reasoning is clear enough that no explanation is needed, Erik raises a brow back at her. "We spoke. Yesterday. Emma informed me of your concerns."
Mystique's brows lower again and her jaw tightens noticably. After a moment she turns more fully toward him. "How did he find you?"
"I found him. Subtlety is not one of his stronger suits." Right hand settled to rest upon the couch back, he blanks out the television with a glance.
Surprise shoots clear through Mystique's expression. There is a brief flicker of distraction for the snuffed television, no longer a matter of familiarity, and then her attention fixes fully on Erik once more. "Why?"
"He has been making a mess in his ongoing endeavor to find me. Placing himself and others in danger of arrest, or worse." Matter-of-fact Erik evens out his expression again, with a measure of interest for her as of yet unexplaned presence retained.
"So you thought it wise to place yourself in that danger instead?" Mystique wonders briefly. Her attention turns away from Erik so she can stride past his couch and toward the kitchen without bothering with things like permission. Her form shifts as she moves, rippling from jeans and a heavy outer coat into blue skin and scales.
"I thought it wise to approach him on my terms, at a time and place where mobilization by the authorities would be ramshackle at best, should they have been keeping an eye on him." Mild surprise etched in around his eyes, he narrows them into a squint as he turns his head to follow her. "Emma said you were worried."
"Did she?" Mystique's tone levels into her own hollow tones, and for a brief moment she closes her eyes before turning to the task of opening first one cupboard and then another. "What happened?"
The cupboards are empty. There is a moth in one, and a salt shaker in another. Meanwhile, Erik moves to trail after her into the kitchen area, unphased by her blue, scaley nudity as ever. "He begged me to be his master."
Mystique's hand pauses on one cupboard, holding it open, as she turns to stare at him. There is a single blink that turns into a frown before she wonders, "Do you have no alcohol?"
"..." says Erik, brow wrinkled into a slight knit at her before he steps back and turns to pace for a door that presumably leads to his bedroom. "I live above a bar."
"That was not my question," Mystique grumps, a touch sullen.
"No," is his mild agreement, muffled by distance while he pries open the leather briefcase he's tossed up onto the bed. A bottle of whiskey is withdrawn from its rest next to his laptop, and atop a gun. Powder blue, oddly enough. The briefcase is snapped closed again, and a dusty glass is collected from the night stand. Then he re-emerges.
Mystique scowls irritably as she paces free of the kitchen. By the time Erik re-emerges, she's draped herself in an inelegant slouch on the couch, and at the sound of his approach she remarks, "He really puts me in an extremely foul mood. What else happened?"
"I declined, and warned him against further harassment. He threw a temper tantrum." The glass is taken over to the sink and rinsed, and both are brought back to the couch to be offered over the back close to her shoulder.
"He is currently puking on the sidewalk in the East Village," Mystique shares with clear exasperation that edges into frustration as she adds, "I very much wanted to break a finger or two. I feel I ought to be exceedingly proud of my self-control." She glances up at the offer, eyes widened in brief surprise, and turns to look at Erik over her shoulder for the span of a second or two before she raises a hand to accept them. After a moment, turned forward again, she thinks to murmur, "Thank you."
"You're welcome." Glass and bottle relenquished, he turns to pace the short distance back to the kitchen, where he lowers himself to a seat on a tall stool likely stolen from downstairs.
Golden eyes follow him briefly before they turn steadfastly away and focus on the task of tilting a certain measure of whiskey into the offered glass. She is very precise.
"It's only a matter of time before he is taken in, or someone else kills him."
"Mmm." Mystique's tone is warmed by the burn of whiskey as she leans her head back and allows her eyes to fall lightly closed. "He's quite rich," she remarks.
"His family is wealthy." Bony fingers splayed out on the kitchen counter at his side, Erik examines the tendons standing out pale over his knuckles as he speaks.
"Yes." Mystique does not say 'that's what I said'. See? Self-control!
That established, Erik curls his fingers and turns his hand over. The palm is not much more interesting than the back.
Mystique blinks her eyes open once more, the better to see her glass of whiskey as she lifts it for a sip. The better to turn a silent gaze toward Erik in the kitchen.
Unaware that he is being stared at, Erik tugs his sleeve up enough to brush his thumb lightly over the faded blue ink tattooed into his wrist, then lifts his hand to draw the salt shaker out of its open cabinet and into his waiting hand.
Turned forward again, Mystique tips her head back to finish her whiskey in a gulp that's enough to send even her into a faint coughing fit, complete with squinty-eyed wince.
Expression slack, Erik looks up at the back of her coughing head and turns the salt shaker over between his hands.
Breath regained and whiskey downed, Mystique rises neatly with bottle in one hand and glass in the other. By the time she's reached the kitchen to return them, she's raven-haired and clothed once more.
Magneto frowns at her and pushes back to his feet. The salt shaker is set back down on the counter.
Mystique extends the glass balanced carefully on an open palm in offering, whiskey bottle still held loosely at her side. "I'm glad to see he did not cause any trouble," she states.
"He's caused plenty of trouble. Just none of it particularly damaging. As of yet." The glass is taken, and Erik glances blandly down at it.
"You know what I mean," Mystique answers with a faint tightening at the corners of her lips. She lifts the whiskey bottle to settle it on the counter with a heavy, rolling clank of metal against hard surface.
No comment. Erik glances after the whiskey, and then back to her, right hand worked idly over the left.
In the wake of silence, Mystique leaves that as her farewell. She does add, after some thought, a faint nod before she turns for the door.
The nod is returned, and Erik watches her advance upon the door before he turns to pace back for the couch.
The door opens. The door closes. There are rather fewer dramatics to the whole thing this time. Within the span of several seconds, Mystique is gone - or at least disappeared to Stvols below, where she may find herself a bit more alcohol before her trip home.
Magneto lowers himself stiffly back down to the couch, where he simply sits for a moment before he leans to reach for his paper. The door doesn't lock after her.
Mystique visits Magneto to find out about his trip to see Leonardo. All together, they say very little to each other.
I honestly wonder how Leonardo Maxwell manages to perform daily tasks, so great is his stupidity. He puts me in an exceedingly foul mood. At the moment, I even miss Victor. At least if he were here, I would have options to work out the mood. Disguise is, at times, very, very tiresome.
11/17/2007
=NYC= East Village - Manhattan
East Village would seem, by name, to be an extension of the arty Greenwich Village and this is precisely what the developers would like you to think. But East Village's spirit is closer to that of Lower East Side. East Village's spirit is that of the punk, the restrained (and unrestrained) riot, the beat poet turned homeless and angry. And some of those ragged street walkers indeed have nowhere to sleep.
East Village /is/, in the end, arty and experimental, but with an edge of drugs and desperation. If also the kind of free thought and frenetic drive that spark cultural revolution.
It's evening, and this particular street is fairly quiet other than the cars going by and the occasional person walking home late from work. Leonardo happens to be coming from Purgatory, wobbling down the street with breath smelling of wine. "I feel much better now, and I avoided getting drunk." he says to the hand held in front of his face.
Elizabeth is not coming from Purgatory. Where, exactly, she /is/ coming from is not clear, although her clothing is still businesslike and neat, but that much at least is certain. Her head is lowered a touch as she hurries her way through the brisk chill, although she is not, at least, obscuring her vision with a hand held in front of her.
Leonardo keeps walking along, and when he removes the hand, he's about to walk right into Elizabeth, too drunk and mentally distracted to notice.
Elizabeth , on the other hand, is not. Her head jerks up and she stops short just in time to miss Leonardo, although she does not sidestep - if he keeps going, he'll keep going right into her. "/Excuse/ me," she says sharply.
Leonardo stops, almost falling. Unlike when she first saw him, he looks like a mixture of exhausted and laid back, and if she nudged him he'd very likely fall over. "Sorry about that. Hey, you're the Friends woman." he notices as he eyes linger to buildings and objects, but eventually make their way back to her. The other thing different from their first meeting are the lack of contractions in his speech. "We don't gotta be enemies, ya know."
"Leonardo Maxwell," Elizabeth notes with clear distaste. She takes a step backwards, distancing herself as her chin edges up. "You are an idiot and apparently a drunk."
"I'm tired of people calling me an idiot, I do my best ya know..." Leonardo says with a hurt look on his face, staring down at the ground inbetween her feet. "You don't have to sic the rest of your Friends on me anymore, I'm not looking for Magneto any longer, he's an ass. And I'm not drunk."
"Your best is clearly inadequete for any reasonable person." Disdain is not, we must note, hidden in the least.
"I learned from my mistakes, this wise woman gave me advice, I don't need anyone but myself." Leonardo declares in his sternly emo tone. "I'm a human, why are you so against me?"
"You aren't fooling anyone, you know." Elizabeth's brows shoot up as her fingers tighten irritably on the strap of her briefcase.
"There's nothing mutant about me! Do I look mutant to you?" Leonardo asks, forgetting about his hair due to his intoxication. "Being a mutant would be too hard."
"Do I look Friends of Humanity to you?" Elizabeth retorts before narrowing her eyes sharply on Leonardo. "You've seen Magneto?"
"Why would I tell you that?" Leonardo asks with an eyebrow raised as if she were crazy. "I already told you that I think you're a part of Friends, we're out here in the middle of the night, I'm not oblivious to what a woman can do to a guy if she's determined, or has a gun."
Elizabeth's spine stiffens slightly as she stares at Leonardo, lips pressed into a thin line. "Tell me," she encourages darkly. "What /can/ a woman do?"
"Beat me up, break my bones, shoot me, pull out a knife and stab me, taser me, mace me, should I go on?" Leonardo lists seriously, holding his head dizzily for a moment. "So the last thing I would tell you is that I met Magneto the other day."
"And yet you do."
"What are you talking about?" Leonardo asks in a confused wince. "Why are you always asking me questions? Lying to the police with Friends propaganda is not enough to get a so called 'dangerous mutant' arrested, they would have to do a blood test, and your argument would be blown out of the water."
"And you are so very baffled as to why everyone keeps calling you an idiot." Elizabeth's voice thickens with scorn as her gaze rakes across him, and then she steps swiftly past him to continue on her way.
"I'm not!" Leonardo yells in a drunken rage and one car after another's alarms go off, but nothing else of note. Then he just starts walking away from her, stumbling, and throwing up on the ground before continuing on his way.
Leonardo is drunk. Mystique is not happy.
=NYC= Erik's Apartment - Archstone Westbury - Apartments in the Sky
Still new, this apartment is furnished but sparsely decorated. There is a great deal of color over fresh wooden flooring. Most of the furniture is black! The walls in the living room are a matte scarlet. Yay! There is a large moose standing in the living room. It says someone was hunting it.
The flat above Stvol's does not really look occupied. There is a couch, and a refrigerator, and a small television situated atop a crate, but there is little in the way of personal belongings. There are no notes littered across the rickety kitchen table, and there is no food in the cabinets or on the counter. But Erik is her, semi-relaxed in a blazer and blue jeans with the evening news on mute and a copy of the times open between his knees.
*here.
Tabs kept on the Master of Magnetism make him easy to locate, even in his somewhat less pleasant digs. For this visit, Mystique has abandoned Elizabeth in favor of another raven-haired beauty with thin lips and a sharp jawline. Her fist knocks once, twice against the door, and then she drops her hand to the knob.
That is unusual. His eyes lifted from the paper at the knock, Erik pauses a moment before folding back to the front page to squint at the date. The sixteenth. Rent is not even remotely due. Mulling over this, he remains seated for a good minute before he folds the paper aside and pushes to his feet to move quietly for the (locked) door.
Outside the door, Mystique tries the knob and then pulls her hand back, frowning in disappointment as it fails to open to her whims. For a moment she considers simply picking the lock, but intention is apparently not strong enough to urge the effort.
Padded footfalls drawn to a slow halt on the opposite side of the door, Erik stands and listens, for what it is worth. There is no peep hole, and his curiosity is such that he cannot simply ignore whoever may be here to harass him. Perhaps it is a drunk person. "Who is there?" he demands finally, in gruff Russian.
Mystique is not drunk, although she is greatly considering it. Her head tilts slightly at the sound of footsteps, and the blunt cut of her hair falls against the line of her jaw. Her fingers curve lightly into her palms. "Open the door, Erik."
Not the reply he was anticipating. Brows falling a bit, the door unlocks itself, and he reaches to open it without further question.
Mystique has, in the meantime, reached for the knob again, and the combined force of push and pull sends it swinging toward Erik a bit too hard. Oops.
Thump. Erik has reflexes enough to stop the door with his shoulder rather than with his forehead, but not enough to get out of the way.
Frustration seeps clearly from Mystique's every pore, and it is in no way lessened by Erik's pitiful reflexes. She fixes him with a Look and moves to brush past him into the apartment proper without another word.
Expression an awkward, muddled blank, Erik skews his brows away from her Look and leans the close the door after her in silence before he reaches up to rub at his shoulder. "Evening."
"What a lovely place, Erik," Mystique notes, taking in the place with a fast sweep of her gaze. "You're moving up in the world. I imagine you could get drunk merely by inhaling the fumes that rise up from Stvols."
Magneto, who is quite sober, levels his brows at that. "And you are as charming as ever." More than accusation, his tone has an odd hint of observation to it, rather as if he's had some suspicion or another confirmed.
Mystique's lips twist as she pauses halfway through the living area and glances over her shoulder at him. There is a long moment's silence as she studies him, eyes a brilliant ice blue.
His own eyes holding steady at a chilly shade of slate in the warm light that floods the living area from a single lamp, Erik studies her back, still positioned near the door.
Apparently not finding whatever she was looking for, Mystique turns forward again and draws in a single, deep breath. "I encountered Leonardo Maxwell again today," she informs him briskly.
His bristled jaw worked in muted frustration when her attention has turned away, Erik pulls in a steadying breath before he paces the few steps required to take him back to the couch. "He seems your type."
Mystique's eyes snap back to Erik, dark brows shooting up.
Apparently assuming that his reasoning is clear enough that no explanation is needed, Erik raises a brow back at her. "We spoke. Yesterday. Emma informed me of your concerns."
Mystique's brows lower again and her jaw tightens noticably. After a moment she turns more fully toward him. "How did he find you?"
"I found him. Subtlety is not one of his stronger suits." Right hand settled to rest upon the couch back, he blanks out the television with a glance.
Surprise shoots clear through Mystique's expression. There is a brief flicker of distraction for the snuffed television, no longer a matter of familiarity, and then her attention fixes fully on Erik once more. "Why?"
"He has been making a mess in his ongoing endeavor to find me. Placing himself and others in danger of arrest, or worse." Matter-of-fact Erik evens out his expression again, with a measure of interest for her as of yet unexplaned presence retained.
"So you thought it wise to place yourself in that danger instead?" Mystique wonders briefly. Her attention turns away from Erik so she can stride past his couch and toward the kitchen without bothering with things like permission. Her form shifts as she moves, rippling from jeans and a heavy outer coat into blue skin and scales.
"I thought it wise to approach him on my terms, at a time and place where mobilization by the authorities would be ramshackle at best, should they have been keeping an eye on him." Mild surprise etched in around his eyes, he narrows them into a squint as he turns his head to follow her. "Emma said you were worried."
"Did she?" Mystique's tone levels into her own hollow tones, and for a brief moment she closes her eyes before turning to the task of opening first one cupboard and then another. "What happened?"
The cupboards are empty. There is a moth in one, and a salt shaker in another. Meanwhile, Erik moves to trail after her into the kitchen area, unphased by her blue, scaley nudity as ever. "He begged me to be his master."
Mystique's hand pauses on one cupboard, holding it open, as she turns to stare at him. There is a single blink that turns into a frown before she wonders, "Do you have no alcohol?"
"..." says Erik, brow wrinkled into a slight knit at her before he steps back and turns to pace for a door that presumably leads to his bedroom. "I live above a bar."
"That was not my question," Mystique grumps, a touch sullen.
"No," is his mild agreement, muffled by distance while he pries open the leather briefcase he's tossed up onto the bed. A bottle of whiskey is withdrawn from its rest next to his laptop, and atop a gun. Powder blue, oddly enough. The briefcase is snapped closed again, and a dusty glass is collected from the night stand. Then he re-emerges.
Mystique scowls irritably as she paces free of the kitchen. By the time Erik re-emerges, she's draped herself in an inelegant slouch on the couch, and at the sound of his approach she remarks, "He really puts me in an extremely foul mood. What else happened?"
"I declined, and warned him against further harassment. He threw a temper tantrum." The glass is taken over to the sink and rinsed, and both are brought back to the couch to be offered over the back close to her shoulder.
"He is currently puking on the sidewalk in the East Village," Mystique shares with clear exasperation that edges into frustration as she adds, "I very much wanted to break a finger or two. I feel I ought to be exceedingly proud of my self-control." She glances up at the offer, eyes widened in brief surprise, and turns to look at Erik over her shoulder for the span of a second or two before she raises a hand to accept them. After a moment, turned forward again, she thinks to murmur, "Thank you."
"You're welcome." Glass and bottle relenquished, he turns to pace the short distance back to the kitchen, where he lowers himself to a seat on a tall stool likely stolen from downstairs.
Golden eyes follow him briefly before they turn steadfastly away and focus on the task of tilting a certain measure of whiskey into the offered glass. She is very precise.
"It's only a matter of time before he is taken in, or someone else kills him."
"Mmm." Mystique's tone is warmed by the burn of whiskey as she leans her head back and allows her eyes to fall lightly closed. "He's quite rich," she remarks.
"His family is wealthy." Bony fingers splayed out on the kitchen counter at his side, Erik examines the tendons standing out pale over his knuckles as he speaks.
"Yes." Mystique does not say 'that's what I said'. See? Self-control!
That established, Erik curls his fingers and turns his hand over. The palm is not much more interesting than the back.
Mystique blinks her eyes open once more, the better to see her glass of whiskey as she lifts it for a sip. The better to turn a silent gaze toward Erik in the kitchen.
Unaware that he is being stared at, Erik tugs his sleeve up enough to brush his thumb lightly over the faded blue ink tattooed into his wrist, then lifts his hand to draw the salt shaker out of its open cabinet and into his waiting hand.
Turned forward again, Mystique tips her head back to finish her whiskey in a gulp that's enough to send even her into a faint coughing fit, complete with squinty-eyed wince.
Expression slack, Erik looks up at the back of her coughing head and turns the salt shaker over between his hands.
Breath regained and whiskey downed, Mystique rises neatly with bottle in one hand and glass in the other. By the time she's reached the kitchen to return them, she's raven-haired and clothed once more.
Magneto frowns at her and pushes back to his feet. The salt shaker is set back down on the counter.
Mystique extends the glass balanced carefully on an open palm in offering, whiskey bottle still held loosely at her side. "I'm glad to see he did not cause any trouble," she states.
"He's caused plenty of trouble. Just none of it particularly damaging. As of yet." The glass is taken, and Erik glances blandly down at it.
"You know what I mean," Mystique answers with a faint tightening at the corners of her lips. She lifts the whiskey bottle to settle it on the counter with a heavy, rolling clank of metal against hard surface.
No comment. Erik glances after the whiskey, and then back to her, right hand worked idly over the left.
In the wake of silence, Mystique leaves that as her farewell. She does add, after some thought, a faint nod before she turns for the door.
The nod is returned, and Erik watches her advance upon the door before he turns to pace back for the couch.
The door opens. The door closes. There are rather fewer dramatics to the whole thing this time. Within the span of several seconds, Mystique is gone - or at least disappeared to Stvols below, where she may find herself a bit more alcohol before her trip home.
Magneto lowers himself stiffly back down to the couch, where he simply sits for a moment before he leans to reach for his paper. The door doesn't lock after her.
Mystique visits Magneto to find out about his trip to see Leonardo. All together, they say very little to each other.