7/9/07 - Magneto
---
=NYC= Upper East Side - Manhattan
Upper East Side oozes affluence. And power. In the nation may be no place richer, and none more important within the world of political funding. This is no place for apartment buildings. This is no place for the lower classes. Here are mansions and here are townhouses, rising with proud expense on either side of the road. Even the museums (which include the Metropolitan Museum of Art) refuse to scatter like common museums, but are largely organized along a stretch of road often referred to as the Museum Mile.
It is dark. This is because it is night in New York City, though the lights that burn throughout the Park do a fair job of pretending otherwise. There are hours still to go before full night falls; the vague half-light that still greys the sky makes a mockery of silhouettes and colors. It is late enough for tourists to have gone their way home, at least. The people who wander the paths are natives animals, or more foolhardy transplants.
And then there's Rossi.
He ambles at his ease under a brightly lit cluster of lamps, hands shoved in his pockets, a toothpick wedged in the corner of his mouth. Gun and badge burn at his hip; under the blanket of flesh, the metal of his pins snipe in both legs and his right arm. His wallet contains $1.26 in change. He is a rich man, by vending machine standards.
Dawn and dusk both bear lighting conditions ideal for predation. Shapes and shadows are indistinct. There is not enough light to make identity immediately obvious; nor is there too little to spook premature fear into the heart of man at every unexpected sound or gesture. It should come as no surprise then that a silver-haired man with uncomfortably distinct features and an arrogant stride has waited until now to hit the street, just as he did the night before, and presumably, the night before that. He is wearing a jacket despite the heat -- thin, worn out brown leather over a darker shirt. And jeans. He keeps his head down, and by most standards, is rather unremarkable.
By most standards. Not by all. The detective's gaze is idle, and automatic, a professional assessment that reads each figure before moving on to the next. And the next. And the-- familiar, if slightly off; the green eyes (colorless in the haze) sharpen, narrowing. Gravel crunches underfoot. Rossi stops. "You," he says, and thins his mouth. His next thought is derailed. "Jesus Christ. Are you wearing jeans?"
They are even fashionable jeans - faded and sand-washed brown worked into dark, dusty blue. But he does not stop walking, and he does not acknowledge Christopher Rossi. Many people in New York wear jeans. He could be talking to anyone. Even so, as he passes, magnetism sweeps hollow from spine to sternum, and then back again, accounting for gun and badge and change and medical restructuring.
Rossi makes a sound -- an exasperated one, or a rude one, it could pass for either -- and changes his course to match his footsteps with Magneto's. Distance enough to deny association; close enough for conversation. "Slumming it?" he asks conversationally, his glance quizzical. "Or are you just taking the day off?"
No change in stride, no shift in posture, no turn to take a visual study to overlay the magnetic. His hands tucked deep into his jacket pockets, Magneto keeps walking, glare focused hard upon the street that crosses the sidewalk some distance ahead. His shoulders are broad. His back is broad. Even from behind, he is somewhat more physically intimidating than his good friend may remember.
Indeed. Somewhat more. And Rossi says, with an abrupt change of voice: "Fuck. You're the duplicate."
How fortunate for them both that an alley happens to gape to their right almost in time with this observation. Magneto turns abruptly on his heel and reaches with clear intent to sling Rossi into it, all agility and blunt force and extreme irritation.
Some things are eminently predictable. "/Shit/." For instance, Rossi's choice of language. He is already reaching for -- what, his gun? Habit reigns supreme, even in the face of Magneto -- but the move is aborted by the other man's gesture. He grabs instead, scarred hands closing around forearms while his weight skids across pavement. For a split-second, green eyes glare into ice blue. "Christ, Erik--"
Use of the proper name proves to be a poor choice, as the fling is aborted and turned over into a shove instead, directly back into the brick of the nearest wall. Beneath Rossi's grip, one arm is muscle coiled taut over bone. The other feels quite literally like steel, though it bears the same rippled contour that one might expect from an actual arm. "Magneto, to you," comes the cool correction, and he glances down in the direction of the gun, not quite mocking, and not quite daring him to reach for it, either. "Or Lord Magnus, depending upon your preference. It would be in your best interest to elaborate upon your accusation."
Breath explodes out at the collision with the wall, joining the loss of the toothpick to momentum. Rossi coughs: at some point in the near past, he has been chewing spearmint gum. "Fuck," he says, his grip tightening across betraying muscle. His gaze skips from Magneto's arm to his face, searching. In the bared throat, a pulse races in time with his quickened breathing. "Which accusation? You're definitely not the same guy. Where the hell did you come from?"
Magneto is clean-shaven, and the lines around his face bear evidence of no more than forty-something years of life. His eyes and the stainless steel sheen of his hair are marginally more telling. His breath stinks of stale coffee. That much, at least, is much the same as usual when he curls his grip deeper into Rossi's shirt and gives another little shove to remind the younger man of his position. "I remember you. Before the rally." He narrows his eyes. "You are familiar with my counterpart. Where is he?"
Rossi's oath is heartfelt, but repetitive; his imagination is dedicated to other, less pleasant things. "The rally," he says, breathless. Surprise twinges his baritone up out of the deeper registers. "You talking about the Purity thing? What the--" Ow. He looses his grip on Magneto's arm and brings his own up within to slam the elbow into the bend of Erik's. Dirty tricks. Below, his foot hooks on an ankle and yanks.
The resistence catches Magneto off guard, and he jerks his good arm back from the blow, only to find himself rather abruptly on his back, staring up at the darkening sky as he waits for his lungs to refill themselves. Magnetism thrums ominously through the air in the meanwhile. He is not a happy dictator.
And Rossi is not a fool. On the other hand--
Yes, he is.
Eyes dark from adrenaline and fear's copper bite, Rossi presses the advantage immediately, dropping in an attempt to land a heavy knee onto Magneto's chest. There is no elegance in what the NYPD teaches its breed; his hand balls into a fist and slams down, aiming for that dazed face.
"Hhoof--" Crack. Magneto catches it in the face, and his head rebounds back against the cement, fuzzing white static flush across his line of sight. But a line of sight is not strictly required for swinging his left arm across his chest and then blindly back-handed across Rossi's face, adamantium and steel against bone. Fortunately, not at full force, for reasons like having a large New Yorker seated on his chest.
A large New Yorker once seated on his chest, now sent flying sideways and off Magneto to slide messily across the sidewalk. Blood sprays in a fine line of drops, splattered from a cut lip. Dazed and blinded, Rossi skids to a stop on his side and swears, his accents slurred. Road rash. Fuck. It takes a moment for him to push himself dizzily up by an arm.
Less of a spray and more of a pronounced trickle, murky red dips down from a split in Magneto's brow as he struggles to roll back up onto his side, and then his feet. Disoriented.
Likewise Rossi, disoriented, wavering, but the damage is done and cannot be retrieved now. The tousled head lifts, a cough smearing more blood off the side of his hand, and glazed eyes focus in on Magneto. The detective hiccups his leg beneath him and pushes off, launching himself for--
--It has been clearly established, by this point, that Rossi is not the sharpest twig on the evolutionary tree.
Rossi does not land. Instead, his forward launch is thrown into hard, flying reverse. Back into the same wall as before while the violent build of magnetism within its structure threatens to destroy it entirely. Injury and vertigo are shaken off hard, and almost before Christopher hits the wall, a black-plated gauntlet is wrapped in a vice grip around his throat.
The slam of body is followed by the slam of head, both into brick, both with an ugly sound that betrays the fragility of humanity. Chris wheezes desperately for air lost, first to the collision, then to the hand -- blood glistens bright across his lip -- and gropes numbly for Magneto's wrist. His legs cannot support him; under the gauntleted fingers, the straining pulse gallops. Green eyes open wide, blank and dilated. Storm would be so impressed with his interpretation of 'be careful.'
Magneto squeezes until he can feel the gentle feather of blood coarsing its way through flesh beneath metal. Somewhere nearby, there are sirens. Someone has thoughtfully called the police. Nothing is said. He watches Rossi's face very closely, with one cold eye squinted against the blood threatening to cloud his vision.
Breath, already labored, whines from the detective's mouth. The hand gripping Magneto's wrist weakens, the other scrabbling ineffectually at the fingers digging into his throat; Rossi's face, already flushed by earlier exertion, is turning a darker, uglier color. A tiny vessel in the corner of his eye pops, spilling red across white.
"I do not know why you know what you know, but whoever has warned you," says Erik very quietly, "whoever you are working for. They do not know what they are up against." As he speaks, he probes after Rossi's wallet and badge with his free hand. Both are tucked into his own pocket. "Leave me be, or all of you will regret the consequences." And with that and one last solid thump against the wall, Magneto drops Rossi and turns to stride away.
He is in no shape to follow him, even if he wanted to. The detective drops like a sack of potatoes, collapsing onto hands and knees as he gags, heaving in breath with an urgency that blackens vision and topples him sideways into the wall. His arms cannot hold him. Crumpled on his side, Chris Rossi surrenders to unconsciousness, air rasping and rattling in the damaged throat.
Dizzy, dizzy, Magneto manages to maintain a straight path all the same, patting blood down in isolated patches at his heels all the way around the corner, where the trail stops, and the old mutant vanishes well before authorities arrive on the scene.
[Log ends]
Rossi takes a tumble with Magneto. It isn't what you think! --no, wait. It is.
"Jesus," John says. He straddles the chair, arms folding on the plastic back, and watches while the technician snaps another white-edged picture of his partner's throat. "What did you do? Propose?"
Chris's glare is baleful and uneven; one green eye is stained with blood. His throat works, attempting a reply that is aborted by a flinch and another burst of flash that leaves spots dancing in John's vision. The nurse standing by tips the detective's head up and back, gripping him gently by the chin. Chris makes a harsh, ugly sound. Ow.
"Sorry."
"Don't try to talk," John advises, and promptly goads his partner by adding, "You're sort of a fucking idiot, Chris. When the Captain's through with you, you'll be lucky if you have a testicle left."
Over the nurse's gloved hand and the fussing of the photographer, one green-and-red eye slants helplessly at the older detective.
John grins and stands. "You're welcome," he says. "I'll start making the usual calls."
Message left for Ororo Munroe, the night of July 9
"Hey. Uh, I'm calling for Or-- orororo-- I'm calling for ... Cadbury? This is Ken Yamaguchi. I work with Chris Rossi. I think he was supposed to have a date with you tonight. Or maybe it was tomorrow night. I can't remember. I don't listen to half the shit he tells me. Anyway, I'm just calling to tell you that he probably won't make it. It seems he got into a thing with Magneto, and Magneto strangled him, and now Chris can't talk -- hm. Never thought I'd see the day when I'd be grateful to Magneto for something. He's fine. Just thought you should know. That's what we do here in Homicide, call his girlfriends whenever his life gets complicated. Just call us Chris Rossi's answering service. Okay. Bye now."
Message left for Jean Grey, the night of July 9
"Yo, Doc. It's John Beston. You know those medical records you forwarded on to Dr. Wilson? You mind sending them on down to Maimonides? Chris got strangled a little by Magneto -- figures, wouldn't it? All that time he was staying out of trouble, he was just storing it up for something good -- anyway, they're bitching and moaning about his X-Rays. I don't get it. Some kind of nerd lingo. Anyway, gimme a call. You got my number. Thanks."
=NYC= Upper East Side - Manhattan
Upper East Side oozes affluence. And power. In the nation may be no place richer, and none more important within the world of political funding. This is no place for apartment buildings. This is no place for the lower classes. Here are mansions and here are townhouses, rising with proud expense on either side of the road. Even the museums (which include the Metropolitan Museum of Art) refuse to scatter like common museums, but are largely organized along a stretch of road often referred to as the Museum Mile.
It is dark. This is because it is night in New York City, though the lights that burn throughout the Park do a fair job of pretending otherwise. There are hours still to go before full night falls; the vague half-light that still greys the sky makes a mockery of silhouettes and colors. It is late enough for tourists to have gone their way home, at least. The people who wander the paths are natives animals, or more foolhardy transplants.
And then there's Rossi.
He ambles at his ease under a brightly lit cluster of lamps, hands shoved in his pockets, a toothpick wedged in the corner of his mouth. Gun and badge burn at his hip; under the blanket of flesh, the metal of his pins snipe in both legs and his right arm. His wallet contains $1.26 in change. He is a rich man, by vending machine standards.
Dawn and dusk both bear lighting conditions ideal for predation. Shapes and shadows are indistinct. There is not enough light to make identity immediately obvious; nor is there too little to spook premature fear into the heart of man at every unexpected sound or gesture. It should come as no surprise then that a silver-haired man with uncomfortably distinct features and an arrogant stride has waited until now to hit the street, just as he did the night before, and presumably, the night before that. He is wearing a jacket despite the heat -- thin, worn out brown leather over a darker shirt. And jeans. He keeps his head down, and by most standards, is rather unremarkable.
By most standards. Not by all. The detective's gaze is idle, and automatic, a professional assessment that reads each figure before moving on to the next. And the next. And the-- familiar, if slightly off; the green eyes (colorless in the haze) sharpen, narrowing. Gravel crunches underfoot. Rossi stops. "You," he says, and thins his mouth. His next thought is derailed. "Jesus Christ. Are you wearing jeans?"
They are even fashionable jeans - faded and sand-washed brown worked into dark, dusty blue. But he does not stop walking, and he does not acknowledge Christopher Rossi. Many people in New York wear jeans. He could be talking to anyone. Even so, as he passes, magnetism sweeps hollow from spine to sternum, and then back again, accounting for gun and badge and change and medical restructuring.
Rossi makes a sound -- an exasperated one, or a rude one, it could pass for either -- and changes his course to match his footsteps with Magneto's. Distance enough to deny association; close enough for conversation. "Slumming it?" he asks conversationally, his glance quizzical. "Or are you just taking the day off?"
No change in stride, no shift in posture, no turn to take a visual study to overlay the magnetic. His hands tucked deep into his jacket pockets, Magneto keeps walking, glare focused hard upon the street that crosses the sidewalk some distance ahead. His shoulders are broad. His back is broad. Even from behind, he is somewhat more physically intimidating than his good friend may remember.
Indeed. Somewhat more. And Rossi says, with an abrupt change of voice: "Fuck. You're the duplicate."
How fortunate for them both that an alley happens to gape to their right almost in time with this observation. Magneto turns abruptly on his heel and reaches with clear intent to sling Rossi into it, all agility and blunt force and extreme irritation.
Some things are eminently predictable. "/Shit/." For instance, Rossi's choice of language. He is already reaching for -- what, his gun? Habit reigns supreme, even in the face of Magneto -- but the move is aborted by the other man's gesture. He grabs instead, scarred hands closing around forearms while his weight skids across pavement. For a split-second, green eyes glare into ice blue. "Christ, Erik--"
Use of the proper name proves to be a poor choice, as the fling is aborted and turned over into a shove instead, directly back into the brick of the nearest wall. Beneath Rossi's grip, one arm is muscle coiled taut over bone. The other feels quite literally like steel, though it bears the same rippled contour that one might expect from an actual arm. "Magneto, to you," comes the cool correction, and he glances down in the direction of the gun, not quite mocking, and not quite daring him to reach for it, either. "Or Lord Magnus, depending upon your preference. It would be in your best interest to elaborate upon your accusation."
Breath explodes out at the collision with the wall, joining the loss of the toothpick to momentum. Rossi coughs: at some point in the near past, he has been chewing spearmint gum. "Fuck," he says, his grip tightening across betraying muscle. His gaze skips from Magneto's arm to his face, searching. In the bared throat, a pulse races in time with his quickened breathing. "Which accusation? You're definitely not the same guy. Where the hell did you come from?"
Magneto is clean-shaven, and the lines around his face bear evidence of no more than forty-something years of life. His eyes and the stainless steel sheen of his hair are marginally more telling. His breath stinks of stale coffee. That much, at least, is much the same as usual when he curls his grip deeper into Rossi's shirt and gives another little shove to remind the younger man of his position. "I remember you. Before the rally." He narrows his eyes. "You are familiar with my counterpart. Where is he?"
Rossi's oath is heartfelt, but repetitive; his imagination is dedicated to other, less pleasant things. "The rally," he says, breathless. Surprise twinges his baritone up out of the deeper registers. "You talking about the Purity thing? What the--" Ow. He looses his grip on Magneto's arm and brings his own up within to slam the elbow into the bend of Erik's. Dirty tricks. Below, his foot hooks on an ankle and yanks.
The resistence catches Magneto off guard, and he jerks his good arm back from the blow, only to find himself rather abruptly on his back, staring up at the darkening sky as he waits for his lungs to refill themselves. Magnetism thrums ominously through the air in the meanwhile. He is not a happy dictator.
And Rossi is not a fool. On the other hand--
Yes, he is.
Eyes dark from adrenaline and fear's copper bite, Rossi presses the advantage immediately, dropping in an attempt to land a heavy knee onto Magneto's chest. There is no elegance in what the NYPD teaches its breed; his hand balls into a fist and slams down, aiming for that dazed face.
"Hhoof--" Crack. Magneto catches it in the face, and his head rebounds back against the cement, fuzzing white static flush across his line of sight. But a line of sight is not strictly required for swinging his left arm across his chest and then blindly back-handed across Rossi's face, adamantium and steel against bone. Fortunately, not at full force, for reasons like having a large New Yorker seated on his chest.
A large New Yorker once seated on his chest, now sent flying sideways and off Magneto to slide messily across the sidewalk. Blood sprays in a fine line of drops, splattered from a cut lip. Dazed and blinded, Rossi skids to a stop on his side and swears, his accents slurred. Road rash. Fuck. It takes a moment for him to push himself dizzily up by an arm.
Less of a spray and more of a pronounced trickle, murky red dips down from a split in Magneto's brow as he struggles to roll back up onto his side, and then his feet. Disoriented.
Likewise Rossi, disoriented, wavering, but the damage is done and cannot be retrieved now. The tousled head lifts, a cough smearing more blood off the side of his hand, and glazed eyes focus in on Magneto. The detective hiccups his leg beneath him and pushes off, launching himself for--
--It has been clearly established, by this point, that Rossi is not the sharpest twig on the evolutionary tree.
Rossi does not land. Instead, his forward launch is thrown into hard, flying reverse. Back into the same wall as before while the violent build of magnetism within its structure threatens to destroy it entirely. Injury and vertigo are shaken off hard, and almost before Christopher hits the wall, a black-plated gauntlet is wrapped in a vice grip around his throat.
The slam of body is followed by the slam of head, both into brick, both with an ugly sound that betrays the fragility of humanity. Chris wheezes desperately for air lost, first to the collision, then to the hand -- blood glistens bright across his lip -- and gropes numbly for Magneto's wrist. His legs cannot support him; under the gauntleted fingers, the straining pulse gallops. Green eyes open wide, blank and dilated. Storm would be so impressed with his interpretation of 'be careful.'
Magneto squeezes until he can feel the gentle feather of blood coarsing its way through flesh beneath metal. Somewhere nearby, there are sirens. Someone has thoughtfully called the police. Nothing is said. He watches Rossi's face very closely, with one cold eye squinted against the blood threatening to cloud his vision.
Breath, already labored, whines from the detective's mouth. The hand gripping Magneto's wrist weakens, the other scrabbling ineffectually at the fingers digging into his throat; Rossi's face, already flushed by earlier exertion, is turning a darker, uglier color. A tiny vessel in the corner of his eye pops, spilling red across white.
"I do not know why you know what you know, but whoever has warned you," says Erik very quietly, "whoever you are working for. They do not know what they are up against." As he speaks, he probes after Rossi's wallet and badge with his free hand. Both are tucked into his own pocket. "Leave me be, or all of you will regret the consequences." And with that and one last solid thump against the wall, Magneto drops Rossi and turns to stride away.
He is in no shape to follow him, even if he wanted to. The detective drops like a sack of potatoes, collapsing onto hands and knees as he gags, heaving in breath with an urgency that blackens vision and topples him sideways into the wall. His arms cannot hold him. Crumpled on his side, Chris Rossi surrenders to unconsciousness, air rasping and rattling in the damaged throat.
Dizzy, dizzy, Magneto manages to maintain a straight path all the same, patting blood down in isolated patches at his heels all the way around the corner, where the trail stops, and the old mutant vanishes well before authorities arrive on the scene.
[Log ends]
Rossi takes a tumble with Magneto. It isn't what you think! --no, wait. It is.
"Jesus," John says. He straddles the chair, arms folding on the plastic back, and watches while the technician snaps another white-edged picture of his partner's throat. "What did you do? Propose?"
Chris's glare is baleful and uneven; one green eye is stained with blood. His throat works, attempting a reply that is aborted by a flinch and another burst of flash that leaves spots dancing in John's vision. The nurse standing by tips the detective's head up and back, gripping him gently by the chin. Chris makes a harsh, ugly sound. Ow.
"Sorry."
"Don't try to talk," John advises, and promptly goads his partner by adding, "You're sort of a fucking idiot, Chris. When the Captain's through with you, you'll be lucky if you have a testicle left."
Over the nurse's gloved hand and the fussing of the photographer, one green-and-red eye slants helplessly at the older detective.
John grins and stands. "You're welcome," he says. "I'll start making the usual calls."
Message left for Ororo Munroe, the night of July 9
"Hey. Uh, I'm calling for Or-- orororo-- I'm calling for ... Cadbury? This is Ken Yamaguchi. I work with Chris Rossi. I think he was supposed to have a date with you tonight. Or maybe it was tomorrow night. I can't remember. I don't listen to half the shit he tells me. Anyway, I'm just calling to tell you that he probably won't make it. It seems he got into a thing with Magneto, and Magneto strangled him, and now Chris can't talk -- hm. Never thought I'd see the day when I'd be grateful to Magneto for something. He's fine. Just thought you should know. That's what we do here in Homicide, call his girlfriends whenever his life gets complicated. Just call us Chris Rossi's answering service. Okay. Bye now."
Message left for Jean Grey, the night of July 9
"Yo, Doc. It's John Beston. You know those medical records you forwarded on to Dr. Wilson? You mind sending them on down to Maimonides? Chris got strangled a little by Magneto -- figures, wouldn't it? All that time he was staying out of trouble, he was just storing it up for something good -- anyway, they're bitching and moaning about his X-Rays. I don't get it. Some kind of nerd lingo. Anyway, gimme a call. You got my number. Thanks."