OOC: Magneto Commentary
Log: Party-goers
Date: 5/7/07
Players: Magneto & Rossi
Magneto does not RP enough with me.
That is not a comment. That is a statement of fact. Magneto does not RP enough with me, and that is all his fault because he's a goober.
There. I'm sorry. It had to be said.
Now. Moving on....
Two stories of mansion north of New York City, dimmed lights, and live classical music make for a dignified gathering of old white men (and a few women as well, though most of them seem to be a great deal younger and carrying trays of alcohol and appetizer). Conversation is a constant low murmer regarding many fascinating topics. The classification of mutation as a genetic disease. Mutant conspiracy in the government. Mind control and weapons of mass destruction.
Erik is on the fringes of the worst of it. Sipping idly at an elegant flute of champagne, he watches and listens without a tremendous amount of expression or reaction. Another old white male in the shadows close to the wall in a tuxedo that is black upon black upon black, as usual. No cause for concern, here.
Something of more concern in the younger men who wander through the occasion, clad in tuxedos that fit ill -- or rest uneasily on shoulders unaccustomed to such rented finery. Earpieces, unobtrusively flesh-colored, betray their affiliation if the hum of metal under jackets does not otherwise give it away. Security: New York's Finest, some. Rented arms, others. No cause for attention, here. Except. Except except except.
Uncomfortable in a black tuxedo of his own, thick brows angled low, Det. Chris Rossi follows a tray of puffy pastry things out of the recesses of the building into the gathering itself. He is resplendent in his borrowed garb, almost (not quite) to the manner born. Innate arrogance and hostility substitute for true self-confidence in such an environment. Scarred fingers worry at square cufflinks, black onyx in a bed of silver: that much, like the guns at hip and strapped to the ankle, is real.
The scene: a party. The players: Rossi and Magneto. The clothing: tuxedos, because sometimes even the cop puts on a tie and penguin suit. Parenthetically, the %R is a terrible temptation to me. I abuse it mercilessly. Pity the paragraph.
I've mentioned this before, but it's fairly common for me to start out a scene with an objective in mind, or at least an image: a picture of a situation, which I arrange in the set, and then let go. It's like winding up a top and then dropping it on the X that you marked out on the table; it starts out where you want, but then you're pretty much at the mercy of whatever happens next. It's fairly rare that this sort of preconceived scenario fails to prove entertaining or worthwhile, which I think is a result of having an image in mind, rather than an intention. That is to say, I rarely go into scenes with the idea, "I want this and this to happen." This is a problem for Xavier, since a lot of his scenes are precisely that type. On the other hand, Rossi's scenes tend to be exactly the opposite. In general, the predestined kinds of scenes feel extraordinarily artificial, and as a result tend to bring out my very worst RP, since I don't feel at liberty to go wherever I might care to go as the character. It's the difference between scripted and impromptu, I guess: one is John Stewart; the other is Stephen Colbert. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with either -- I just happen to be better at the latter.
In this particular case, we ended up -- this is only how I recall it, not necessarily how it happened, a distinction I should make clear since my recollection almost never has anything to do with reality -- trying to figure out a situation where Rossi and Magneto would run into each other while dressed in evening wear. Rossi does not wear evening wear during the normal course of his day. Imagine that. I did suggest that he visit Magneto at the Hellfire Club, but that idea was rejected. MAGNETO'S SUCH A SPOILSPORT.
Fortunately, we remembered that cops often rent themselves out as security for private events, as a source of extra income. Perfect. And since Magneto wouldn't let us use the Hellfire Club, (go figure!) we decided on a private event during which Magneto would naturally show up: namely, a collection of like-minded, wealthy anti-mutants. He is there to listen to conversations and to memorize faces, making up a Santa's Little Helper list of Who's Who on the Naughty list.
Rossi's reason for being there is not that far different, although his list is probably less likely to end up in casualties. Events like this mean sympathizers for the Friends get together, and conversations that might end up in leads that end up in him getting a little bit closer to Tom. He's been quiet about it, but he's still after the Friends; it's unusual for him to take private gigs like this -- he dislikes them on principle for himself, though tolerant of them for his coworkers, knowing that other people with family and dependants have financial burdens he doesn't -- but this is an event that he wouldn't miss, given the opportunity. He traded with Ken Yamaguchi for the gig.
He's a fish out of water, to put it mildly. Old, rich white men are a different class than he is; he and Shaw connected on the blue collar level, if on very little else: he has absolutely /nothing/ in common with these people. However, he is a reverse snob, so sheer chutzpah and contempt for the upper classes carries him through. The jacket is rented. The cuff links are not. There's a story behind the cuff links; they are an inheritance from his maternal grandfather, Piero. When Rossi decided, without any explanation whatsoever, to leave the seminary. The rest of the family roared and raged about it, demanding reasons that he refused to give. His decision to enter the Police Academy was met with a complicated mixture of pride and disappointment by his relatives. His grandfather was the only one who simply accepted both decisions without comment.
In a family as outspoken as the Rossi family, lack of comment is sometimes more noticeable than noise.
Magneto is comfortable. Oddly so, all things considered -- his posture prim and upright beneath the close-tailored lines of tux, cuffs, and collar. He sips as he prints face after wrinkled face into his memory. He says little and does less. UNTIL. Until weaponry accompanied by familiar metal repair work crosses through the wide open space ahead. The slightest of magnetic buzzes traces through the latter. And then the earpiece goes silent.
The detective stumbles a little, a shiver interrupting his smooth stride. It takes a moment longer for him to register the earbud's silence -- reports are not ongoing, after all, and the partygoers are not the wildest of bunches. He stops on the edge of the floor, his hand going to his ear. Eyes harden under the swift lowering of eyelids; his gaze skips hastily around the room. Old men. Old men everywhere. He turns, searching, his right hand checked over the panel of his tuxedo coat.
And here Magneto thought it would be a boring party. Look! A party favor! And it's all wrapped up in shiny ribbons!
There's something about having magnetism hum through your metallic attachments that sort of grabs your attention. It's months before he actually tells Erik that it hurts when he does it; in the short term, the ache is still so regular that the additional interference doesn't really make that big a difference. Of course Magneto fits in with this crowd. Rich, white, old, powerful, bigoted men -- it fits him to a T. Except for a little quirk of the genes, he'd be one of them in fact instead of fiction.
Rossi rather leaps to an assumption here, but it's not particularly creative or even inspired. The destruction of communication devices in Magneto's immediate vicinity is sort of his hallmark. Rossi has gone through more cell phones than ... well, let's just say that it's turned into a nontrivial expense for him. The combination of that odd shiver in his bones, combined with the fffft of his earpiece? The only way Magneto could make himself more obvious is by throwing an SUV through the party and doing a strip tease on the remains.
I have this image of Rossi sort of spinning in place, in the way that they do in movies when the camera moves around the central figure while he turns in the other direction. Percy's player was mentioning a while back that if Percy had his way, Rossi would be dead, but since the White King and White Queen can't seem to keep themselves from messing with the guy, what the hell can he do? And it's true. To not poke a stick at Rossi would be an act of supreme willpower on Magneto's part, I think. He seems to get this unaccountable glee from messing with the poor man -- and the thing with being an omega mutant terrorist: willpower is something that other people have to worry about.
One corner of Erik's mouth curls gently upward over the rim of his glass when Rossi turns. He swallows the rest of his champagne, drops his glass, and pushes away from the wall at his back to enter the bare edge of the light cast off by one of the room's few sources. The shadows it casts beneath brows, nose, and jaw briefly make his identity unmistakeable, but in half a beat, he is gone again. Moving forward.
Bodies everywhere -- but somewhere along the line, Rossi has learned to recognize the way the man moves. Familiarity snipes at the periphery of his vision, and he turns his head sharply to track it, too late. More bodies herd. His hand contracts, the ring on its finger winking dull, sullen red in a bed of gold. With a muttered apology he pushes through guests, a dog on the hunt for an old, canny lion. His other hand grabs at a fellow officer in passing. He murmurs: what? Something. The guard looks after him, blank.
Another tremor. A ghostly touch, hardly there at all. Erik is having no trouble at all keeping tabs on his detective, for all the apparent trouble the detective is having in attempting to keep tabs on /him/. He circles around wide, prowling again at the party's edges to avoid the odd glance thrown his way. The occasional stalled conversation as somebody /wonders/ drifts in his wake, but most of them shake it off, and his track finally begins to curve in after Christopher.
Rossi pauses nearly in the center of the room, turning in circles once more to track the source of that unnerving, familiar tickle in his bones. His face is intent, professional, stripped clean of extraneous irritation. Ignore, please, the quick leap of a muscle in his jaw and the way cords stand out in his throat as he scopes out the room, a wary dervish in the middle of luxury. Passersby eye him askance and mutter behind their hands. Really, it's impossible to find good hired help these days.
He pauses. He stares through a mass of bodies, eyes narrowed. Shoulders stiffen. He does not need speech to say it. Where. The. Fuck.
Oh, Erik. What fun he is having! The player, as I recall, was chortling to himself about it -- and Magneto himself is not that far from it, either. It's rather like blind man's bluff, with Rossi as the blind man; Magneto is having the fun of poking a stick at him without ever having to come close enough to get barked at. It's the same sort of instinct that makes small children reach out and poke things when they've been expressly told DO NOT TOUCH. A way of asserting independence, defiance, power, control -- in a way, it's rather petty. This is not a playing field on which Rossi can ever fight back. On the other hand, it's also almost affectionate. After all, the kind of damage that Magneto could do to him, given his metallic fittings, is quite severe and definitely painful.
Even Erik's meta refers to Rossi as "Christopher." How he hates that name.
A few short meters away, Erik is enjoying himself with a touch here from one direction - a prod there, from another. He is distinguished from those around him, now, stiff shoulders and cold eyes squared directly to Rossi where the others mingle at all angles around him. A rock in the bigot stream.
Erik may be the man with the feather, but Rossi makes a very bad kitten. He twitches first one way or another, answering those little pokes of magnetism, then sinks his heels into the ground and makes one last circuit. A shift in the current; a knot in the flow of bodies. Green eyes sweep past Magneto, widen marginally, then swing back. You. Chris's mouth moves in a soundless, four-letter word. It requires no imagination at all to interpret it.
Yes. Erik smiles thin when Christopher finally manages to get a lock. The lazy hand he lifts for an odd sort of half-wave is accompanied by a more forceful magnetic shove back into the clump of aging baby boomers at Rossi's back.
Oh, yes. Petty. And somehow, in my mind anyway, not directed solely at Chris, but more at the people behind him; in a sense, it seems like Chris is the collateral damage so he can embarrass the dignity of the bigots that are in the room. Don't mind me, Chris. Let me just borrow your body for a second. (Leer.) Of course, I could be totally misreading that. Chris, on the other hand, has no problems taking that shove personally. Asshole.
Magneto allows Rossi to find him, plainly -- it's obvious by the fact that he's stopped moving -- but the stance and the description of 'cold eyes' sort of sits at odds with the playfulness of the way he's taunting the man. The physicality suggests a lingering mood based on his company and the people he's surrounded by; the playfulness of the pokes, half-malicious, half-humorous, suggest more the relationship that he has with Chris himself.
Chris staggers back. The gathering of older men behind him, knocked like bowling pins by the more solid weight of the NYPD ball, breaks apart with a crash of dropped glasses and scattered hors d'oeuvres. They are well-bred bigots, at least. Their immediate expostulations are well-modulated, and notable for severe, restrained eloquence. The cop pays no attention. Sleeve dampened by champagne, a stray fried prawn pawed off his lapel, he bulldogs his way forward towards Erik, a hand readied to catch the man by the elbow. Body language. Let's you and me go for a walk, ASSHOLE.
Not quite anticipating such a /direct/ response, Erik is caught somewhat by surprise, and has no time to do anything more than pull his arm belatedly out of the way, leaving his upper arm and back more accessable than the backwards jab of his elbow. And still, he chuckles. Christopher is displeased. He has made a fuss. Things could be worse.
My pose is not very elegant, to put it mildly. In fact, ignore it. From time to time I pose well! This is not one of those times. (I say that and immediately find scraps there that are not entirely suckitude: 'prawn pawed off', 'bulldogs his way'-- no, that's it.)
It's a fairly recent thing that I've started to reflect the character's name the way that I do: Chris for those who know him well enough to think of him that way (not even for Magneto will I pose 'Christopher'); Rossi for those who know him that way. There's an informality about both names that refer to the man himself -- that is to say, calling him 'Chris' or 'Rossi' doesn't necessarily indicate a level of intimacy with him that's greater than any other -- but there is, I think, a quality of /cop/ to the Rossi name when I pose with it, one that isn't there when I call him Chris. In a previous commentary I made a note about the fact that Erik's player shifts between the two personas, Erik and Magneto, and that the indications are there in the pose's name choice. For Rossi, it's a little different. There are very few people for whom he's the person first and the cop second, although -- now that I write that, I realize that's inaccurate. The cop and the man are almost inextricably linked, in fact, so much so that it's an actual effort for him not to be the cop and just be the man. It's not a healthy lifestyle, and certainly contributes to his problems with personal vulnerability and exposure. The people with whom I pose "Chris" rather than "Rossi" (Storm, Magneto... I think that's about it, actually) are the people around whom he's more man than cop. Which is to say, the cop is buried a little bit deeper than it normally is at other times.
Like I said, though, this doesn't mean squat in terms of emotional or mental intimacy.
That said, why Chris with Magneto, of all people, when the cop seems to be -- or should be -- more in supremacy than with almost anyone else? Good question. It's a dangerous truth that familiarity breeds contempt, and even though /contempt/ might not be the correct word, there's certainly a ... maybe a flippancy? No. A casualness to Rossi's dealings with the man that is not /safe/. He's encountered Magneto too often and gotten away with too much; he still respects the power, but he no longer fears the man. In other words, Magneto has managed to become Erik in Chris's eyes: he's the man rather than the criminal. It's a deadly sort of familiarity, for lack of a better word, and one that he'll suffer for when he encounters AU Magneto. There are times when he forgets (not completely, but enough!) that Erik is Magneto, cop-killer.
Magneto should be proud of this. It's what he wanted, after all. Isn't it? All this time cultivating Rossi, arguing at him, showing up in his apartment just to drink his whiskey and be a shit-- it's all part of that ongoing attempt to make himself real in Chris's eyes, right? Right?
Stained and rumpled as Chris is, he is not so foolhardy as to manhandle Erik Lensherr, Master of Magnetism, Magneto himself, out of a crowded party.
No, wait. He is.
"Outside," Chris orders, his arm reaching to sling around Erik's shoulders, the image of a man meeting an old (old, old, old!) buddy by surprise. Teeth flash in the quick slash of a smile; if it has a somewhat harder edge than true affability might demand, well. Who can blame him? "How about we check out the balcony? The view's a hoot."
Decidedly more comfortable and confident in treacherous waters, Erik has no compunctions about pushing an arm of his own around Rossi's back in return. He is clean cut and well-groomed, grizzled beard grazed close to his jaw and silver hair neatly styled, and he moves with dignity and grace despite the parasite he has acquired. "As you wish. Are you alright? You seem distressed."
Parasite. hahaha!
(twat.)
Yet again, a bad pose on my part. Yet again, an awesome one on Magneto's. It's not so much the phrasing that stands out with Erik's poses as it is what he /does/ with them. Erik's player has a gift for bringing out the unexpected, for concentrating on details that I tend to skip right by because I'm ... sort of lazy, to be honest, but also because I'm just not very observant. Also, sometimes Erik's player just has a /way/ with words. 'grizzled beard grazed close to his jaw' for instance. And the fact that he quite companionably puts his arm around Rossi, which is a less obtrusive (certainly a less /violent/) way of letting Chris know, yes, you can steer me, but only because I let you! Hi, friend! You're a funny little cockroach!
"Can't imagine why," Chris says -- almost sings, his harsh baritone growing briefly melodious -- as he steers their steps towards the french doors nearby. He stiffens but submits to Erik's arm, the line of his jaw carved out by a rough chisel. He, too, is clean cut and well-groomed, hair in order, jaw shaved, and if his stalk is a little stiff-legged and more reminiscent of a suspicious rottweiler's than a man heading out for a smoke with his best pal, surely he can be excused. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Celebrating the mutant problem?" Erik tries without real hope for deception, his brows lifted and innocent. What else would he be doing here? "I must say, I am surprised to see /you/ here. I am almost /certain/ that you socialize with the afflicted on a reasonably regular basis." Erik gestures the french doors open a little carelessly with a flick of his free hand.
Chris says with fresh exasperation, "I need the money, and you never know what kind of low-lifes show up to these things. You never heard of subtlety?" It fails as a reproach, given that it emerges as more of a lyric than a question. He steps up his pace out of the room. The night outside is cool and sweet, the day's heat having given way to a pleasant breeze and night-blooming flowers. With the socializing taking place inside, the balcony is empty of company; broad and terraced, it looks out over a steep hill of equally expensive homes and views.
"However do you determine what qualifies as a 'low-life' in these conditions?" Much as they opened, the doors sweep silently closed after them, dimming conversation and music to little more than a muffled murmer behind them. Has Erik ever heard of subtlety? Perhaps not. He drops the arm he has around Christopher and moves to step away for the balcony's ornate railing. "I will hire you, if you are in such dire need."
Erik's such a mensch.
I'd forgotten that at the time this log took place, Chris was still suffering from the BTP effect: namely, he starts to sing when he gets angry. It's had a salutatory effect on him; sheer embarrassment has forced him to learn to moderate his temper, and he's finally taken to heart some of the anger management exercises that his shrink has lectured him about. Unfortunately, there are still moments when the melodic theme forces its way into his voice, and he usually requires a second to calm himself down before continuing. Not, mind you, a luxury that he always has when he's on the job.
It's nice of Erik that he even bothers to answer Chris, when the question is really almost rhetorical. Of course Chris knows what Magneto's doing here; it's a futile hope that the leader of the Brotherhood (ex or not) would decide to extend the olive branch of friendship to a bunch of anti-mutant bigots. The fact that Erik bothers to answer at all, even flippantly, indicates that Erik is in a fairly balmy mood, all things considered. He doesn't freeze Chris out with a stare, which is what he would do in his less tolerant moods. Messing with his favorite cop appears to have put him in good humor!
Erik even decides to be cordial. The remark he makes about being surprised to see Chris there is actually conversational. There's an invitation there to more conversation, actual engagement of two guys hanging out, so to speak, even if one of them is annoyed as hell. Chris is often annoyed when Erik is around. This is fact. But it's rare that Magneto gets to take an active hand in making Chris irritable, when usually it's his sheer presence that does it. This time he got to poke with the stick first: in a way, Chris's mood is his brain child. He seems to take a certain quaint pleasure and pride in that.
"The Friends, in case you were wondering," Chris bites out through gritted teeth. His voice jangles, melody battling with monotone, with mixed success. He closes fists around the iron of the railing and leans, stiff-armed, to frown across the landscape. "Thanks for the offer, but I'll pass. You still owe me a good leather overcoat. Not to mention a fucking car."
"The Friends of Humanity? /Here/? What a terrible coincidence." Brows knit, theatrically muddled, Erik braces his hands firmly against cool iron as he too peers harshly out over the lay of the land. "I could simply destroy the entire building."
Still playful, but not really. The suggestion that he could destroy the building is facetious, but ... it isn't really, is it? No, it probably is. (Is it?) Chris hasn't the luxury of treating it as a joke; Erik's past history is variable enough that he could very well mean it. The remark cools Chris down faster than almost anything else could. His temper isn't great, yes, but when it comes to the job, he's a professional: personal feelings take a back seat -- mostly. He can't think straight when he's angry, which is both his strength and his weakness. Ororo worries about him, and with good reason. He doesn't have the kind of self-preservation that he should have; he's capable of taking risks out of sheer temper that most people would never even consider, and his instincts when it comes to personal risk are wildly out of whack with actual mortality.
When he's being a professional, on the other hand, he actually calculates. Mind supercedes emotion. It's mostly when other people are at risk that he manages to get that kind of self-control: when people other than himself are dependent on what he does. Bizarrely, Ororo is really bad for him in this regard; when he was with Leah, who was terribly vulnerable, he actually managed to control his tendency to take risks far more, because she needed him to protect her. If he ever had a family, he'd be far less dangerous in his personal life: again, there would be dependents who he'd be responsible for. Ororo, on the other hand, is not a dependent; she doesn't need him -- and how -- and in fact, she's far more likely to rescue him than the other way around. He therefore feels no restraint. Barring his family, who are fine without him, he's got nobody relying on him when he's not on the job. He has a peculiar lack of value for his own well-being, which isn't really all that surprising when you factor in his childhood. For an arrogant SOB, he also has a quaint lack of self-worth.
I've mentioned before that Erik has a great sense of theater. He's got a flair for the dramatic, and an equal flair for the ridiculous. His sarcasm here is hilarious. Friends of Humanity? Here? Among rich bigots? Gosh. /Golly/. /Really/?
Chris's hands tighten. Knuckles press white through the scarred skin. "You could," he says. His voice shivers a little, stapled down at the edges, and he glances askance at Erik with eyes made colorless by the dark. Dryly, he adds, "I'd rather you didn't."
Magneto's, in turn, are bleached light by what little moon there is to see by. They knife from the open space beyond the balcony to Rossi, and then back out again. Calculating.
"Don't," Chris says, the word stark and sharp. A little less abruptly, he adds, "Or else I'll start singing again, and -- Christ on a pogo stick, I don't think I could stand that."
It does not require telepathy to read Magneto's mind. Why doesn't he throw Chris over the balcony anyway? It would cut the conversation short, for one thing, and Erik wouldn't have come out onto the balcony with Chris if he didn't want to talk. Not when there were other ways to get rid of him. Of all the people in the building, it's Rossi that he has most -- connection to, for lack of a better word. They'll never be equals, but they can see eye to eye in an odd, perverse way. They're both men of principle, honorable in their own ways.
Also, you know. Rossi's hot and Mags totally wants him.
I like the shorter, clipped quality of the last two poses. They move from the more elegant, classical flow of the party into the starker parity of the balcony. Less circus show, more substance, and that's reflected in the pose structure, I think. Mags is excellent at cadence and pacing, something that I'm not as skilled at. I tend to stay stationary in a certain pose length and pose structure, out of habit or -- I don't know. Bad RP? On the other hand, Mags is really good about steering the course of pose length and imagery so that it reflects the general mood and atmosphere of what's happening. He's also a master of silence, which is something that Chris is ... not uncomfortable with, exactly. He uses it a lot! It's his player that occasionally has trouble with it, coming from an older RP tradition. Magneto is very much defined by his silences, I think; the player uses them to convey gravitas, threat, weariness, cynicism, contempt -- all sorts of things. Rossi's version of that is motion and sound, the more obvious forms of physicality.
A slow breath gruffed through his sinuses, Erik firms his grip about the iron in it until the metal conforms to the shape of his hand, creaking mild protest that is lost easily enough in an oncoming breeze.
The detective does not breathe for a moment, his shoulders rising around his ears, then exhales with a impatient jerk of the same. He props his elbows on the railing and knits his fingers loosely together to scowl out at the dark. There is silence for a little while. It is not, perhaps, entirely restful.
"It would look like an accident."
Chris's hands make fists. "I haven't recognized any Friends inside."
"You didn't recognize any terrorists either." Erik turns his head slowly to narrow cold eyes along the railing at Rossi.
Not for a second would Rossi believe that his request that Erik /not/ blow up the building in any way influenced his decision not to. And he'd be right. (At least, I assume he'd be right.) There's a question: if he'd asked, would Erik have done it? Hmm.
Silence is something that Chris is learning to accept from Erik. He /can/ learn! It just takes him a while sometimes. He can be remarkably stupid. He's learned that sometimes it's just not wise to keep talking; given enough silence, Erik will sometimes just talk himself down. I can't remember where it was that he learned that lesson -- when talking simply made the matter worse, with additional injury to himself. It's a toss-up whether he considers the trade worth the pain. If he keeps talking, there's a risk that Magneto will hurt /him/. On the other hand, hurting Rossi means that he's distracted from his original intention--
Okay. This is making Rossi sound like a total self-martyring sap. Rossi is not prone to martyrdom; in a lot of critical, irritating ways, he's quite possibly one of the most self-centered people on the grid. On the other hand, he also has some serious blind spots. He would writhe if he were in any way aware that putting himself in danger's way could be interpreted as self-sacrificial.
Erik wages a continuous battle between his humanity and his ruthless ideal. He's torn more than most: he's faced with regret if he does what he thinks he should do; and he's faced with regret if he doesn't do what he thinks he should do. The playful mood is entirely wiped out, from the second that Chris decided to take Erik's suggestion of destroying the building seriously. If he'd shrugged it off, answered in kind, would the good mood have continued? Maybe. (Mags?) I speculate that the fact that Chris didn't take it as a joke, that he actually treated it as a valid threat, not only shifted the quality of the conversation from guys just hanging out and messing with each other to cop and mutant, as well as reminding Magneto that he's there for a /reason/ and he has a /cause/ and he's got a /responsibility/ that he's been failing all this time by /not/ killing the people who should be killed to make the world a better place. In short, that he's failed by letting his better nature win over his baser.
It wouldn't be a surprise if he took that complicated mess of self-blame and resentment and turned it onto Chris.
(Haha. Like how I keep saying "Erik is doing--" like I have the slightest clue what's going on? I belatedly insert a disclaimer here: these are completely speculations on my part. Erik is not played by me. All my statements and declarations are my own perspective on what Erik is doing and saying, and I don't know dick.)
Teeth show bright, moon-flecked. It is not a smile. Chris straightens, less spry than in months past. "You want to wipe out an entire building full of people on the off chance you might get someone who doesn't like mutants."
"None of them like mutants, or haven't you been paying attention?" Erik pushes off the railing, a restless military pace carrying him close to the balcony's middle.
"People change their minds." Chris's voice bites, the Brooklyn accent bleeding across his baritone. Not irritation so much as -- strain, perhaps. He shoves his hands in his pockets, ruining the line of his jacket. "Bunch of bored rich people. Today they swing one way, tomorrow they swing another. You don't kill people just because they don't like you."
"Government revolves around the wealthy. You are fooling yourself if you believe that nothing will come of these gatherings." Squared hands closed into fists, Erik pauses only briefly before brooding onward to the opposite end of the balcony. "I am under no obligation to explain myself to you."
Erik says that, but then he explains himself anyway, part of his ongoing campaign to convert Chris into -- what? Absolution? Understanding? I doubt that Erik is even aware of this obscure need anymore, beyond maybe a fleeting irritation that he keeps going back to Chris like an old girlfriend.
The fact that Chris has pushed the conversation (and the threat, let's put blame where blame is due) into the real of the serious means that it can't really sway back to the humorous give and take of earlier. Erik isn't really trying to convince Chris here; he already knows better than to think that he can convince Chris. Instead, it sounds more like he's trying to convince himself, talk himself into an action or chastising himself for not doing it. Chris is just along for the ride.
Rossi knows the truth of what Erik is saying: rich people make law. And the stuff he says in turn is like white noise. He states the obvious, to a person who doesn't operate in the realm of the obvious.
Chris's hands dig fiercely into his pockets. He watches Erik under lowered brows, eyes wary in a blank face. "You're the one who's talking," he says. "You tear this place down, a hundred more will pop up to replace each one who dies."
"I will kill them too," says the man who has not really bothered with killing anyone who did not very much deserve it in quite some time, now. Back turned to Rossi, Erik braces back against the railing and scowls.
"Ever hear about an eye for an eye and the whole world's blind?" The cop takes a step back, measuring the gap between himself and Erik with critical eyes. They knife from the open space beyond the balcony to Erik, and then back out again. Calculating. He sinks his shoulders into the doorposts and waits, frame tight.
"No." Erik has not. He remains upright and rigid. Noble, perhaps, although certainly lacking something. "I suspect that anyone who has the time on their hands to sit around and think of those sorts of things does not have any idea of what they are talking about."
GANDHI, YOU FUCKWIT. GANDHI.
It's sad how poorly educated the older generation is.
It just occurred to me that there's something almost Rogue-ish about the "I will kill them too," from Magneto. It's an almost petulant retort, like a teenager threatening to chop his nose off to spite his face or ... uh, some much better conceived corollary that I can't come up with right now.
I haven't written a lot about the poses in this commentary because ... I don't know why. It's too late now. If you're interested about my pontificating about poses and stylings and word choices and all that, you can check out my other commentaries. This one is the first one I've done in ages, so it's a bit rough. Sorry, Mags! I also haven't talked a whole lot about Chris's mood during this scene, which is a weird omission on my part. He has no sense of humor. It's awful, isn't it? He's ... I don't know. His emotions about his encounters with Magneto are increasingly ambiguous; he's nowhere near as cranky about them as he seems. He's certainly not happy about the pain that seems to come with them, inevitably, but there's a quality of -- expansion, I guess I should say, or challenge, that he doesn't get from many people but Emma, maybe. He's forced by Magneto to keep his eyes wide open, to force his mind open to anticipate the unexpected and the illogically logical. And he's discovered over time that the best way to deal with Magneto, the most brutal and effective way to keep Magneto interested, diverted, distracted, what-have-you, is by exposing his vulnerabilities and making himself more human to Erik. It's painful for him! It's not natural for a man of Chris's stamp to open himself to friends, much less enemies.
There's a completely irrational part of him, a tiny, minute leftover from Father Christopher, that keeps thinking that if he says the right thing or triggers the right thought, he'll be able to bring Erik in from beyond the pale. To jail, yes, but! That's better than the alternative, right?
I don't remember why Chris was measuring the space between them; it was a callback, I think, to the original glance that Magneto did to measure the distance between Chris and the balcony's edge.
Chris chuffs a quiet snort, the ring on his finger winking as he scrubs at the lower half of his face. "Gandhi," he supplies. "Mahatma. Skinny Indian guy. Sat around and pissed off the British. You don't strike me as the Boddhisatva type," he allows, slouching a little more comfortably against the wood. "Or whatever it is that the Hindus call it. You don't ever get tired of blowing shit up and killing people?"
Magneto frowns harder, attention turned firmly inward despite the ongoing scrape of his eyes over the surrounding hills. "Mahatma Gandhi was a human." So there. "I tire of being ineffectual."
Silence answers him. It is watchful. Alive. A hunted animal learns to recognize the footsteps of its enemy. "If I were a priest," Chris says, "I'd tell you to go to confession. Burden of sins, and all that jazz."
"I trust that God is fully aware of what I have done and what I have wished to do." As his transgressions are glaring and plentiful. He probably has an entire album of Magneto-involved transgressions that requires constant maintinence to remain up to date. Erik tucks his scruffed chin to scowl down at the bony curl of his knuckles around the railing.
Chris drags himself up against the wall. Inside, near the closed door, masculine voices rise in a small debate that barely scratches the surface of argument, hampered as it is by pure civility. "Road to hell and good intentions," he says. He ambles forward again, limping a little, to lean on the same railing that supports Erik. "It takes more than a generation to make a change, man. They've barely started. It's only been, what. A decade since people found out about mutations?"
That phrase, "I tire of being ineffectual," worries Chris more than anything that has gone before. Because a threat of a specific action is one thing; a generalized statement like that, from a man who once blew out most of the city? He's unpredictable and he's powerful and he's dangerous, and he's having some sort of end-of-life crisis. And the most immediate target to hand is Chris. He jokes from time to time that someday Erik will kill him, and while some part of him has become complacent to some extent about his safety where Erik is concerned, fundamentally he actually believes it. One day Erik will remember that he's Magneto, and that Chris is just a human, and will use the metal that Xavier School stuck in him to rip him apart.
The Italian in him appreciates the morbid irony of that possibility.
I'm so not thrilled with my poses in this scene. Please ignore them. Pay attention to Magneto. The way Magneto dismisses Mahatma Gandhi just because he was human (so there) is just hilarious to me. I mentioned before about Magneto's flair for the comedic, right?
Edit to add: ...oh. I remember I was going to mention this. Chris's use of the word, 'man,' -- "It takes more than a generation to make a change, man." -- It's a level of casualness that he hasn't used with Erik before, though it may not look like it since that kind of thing is embedded in his normal speech patterns. It's an indicator, as much as anything else, that he's got a dangerous level of personal complacency regarding Magneto's attitude towards him; the fact that that doesn't extend to Erik's /actions/ is a separate issue. Don't ask how he can fear the actions and not the man -- it makes no sense to me either, but it probably works better if you consider it as hating the sin but not the sinner.
Magneto gives Chris a look that is unmistakably skeptical and condescending. He is young and stupid and human, worst of all. "Ah, well, When you phrase it just so--" Erik pushes back from the railing and turns back for the doors, "I will be in my apartment, drawing up plans for world peace."
And yet Magneto continues to haunt him, like a boil on his backside. A boil in thigh-high boots. Chris straightens. "I'll see you out," he says, falling into step beside Erik, and -- because he is young and stupid and human, worst of all -- slings his arm around Magneto's shoulders, a buddy, a pal, a mensch. "Maybe we can get you some of those little crab puffs on the way."
He is not so tolerant this time. Coarse and irritable, Erik pistons a bony elbow into Rossi's gut in time with a shoulder-driven shove whose message is fairly clear. He is no longer in the mood.
The detective is a solid enough mass, but bony elbows, well. Chris, already reaching for the doors, lets out a whoosh of air at that unfriendly gesture. Mean! He hiccups, coughing through the unexpected exhalation: a so-dignified picture to present to the room inside as one of the french doors swings open. Startled, mild eyes frown at the incoming pair. Honestly. The /quality/ of Security these days--
Magneto does not so much as spare Christopher a glance over his shoulder. He pushes in through the open door and onward with broad shoulders braced against anyone foolhardly enough to cross his path. Where he goes, nobody knows!
I'm tired now. I don't want to write anymore. DONE.
Date: 5/7/07
Players: Magneto & Rossi
Magneto does not RP enough with me.
That is not a comment. That is a statement of fact. Magneto does not RP enough with me, and that is all his fault because he's a goober.
There. I'm sorry. It had to be said.
Now. Moving on....
Two stories of mansion north of New York City, dimmed lights, and live classical music make for a dignified gathering of old white men (and a few women as well, though most of them seem to be a great deal younger and carrying trays of alcohol and appetizer). Conversation is a constant low murmer regarding many fascinating topics. The classification of mutation as a genetic disease. Mutant conspiracy in the government. Mind control and weapons of mass destruction.
Erik is on the fringes of the worst of it. Sipping idly at an elegant flute of champagne, he watches and listens without a tremendous amount of expression or reaction. Another old white male in the shadows close to the wall in a tuxedo that is black upon black upon black, as usual. No cause for concern, here.
Something of more concern in the younger men who wander through the occasion, clad in tuxedos that fit ill -- or rest uneasily on shoulders unaccustomed to such rented finery. Earpieces, unobtrusively flesh-colored, betray their affiliation if the hum of metal under jackets does not otherwise give it away. Security: New York's Finest, some. Rented arms, others. No cause for attention, here. Except. Except except except.
Uncomfortable in a black tuxedo of his own, thick brows angled low, Det. Chris Rossi follows a tray of puffy pastry things out of the recesses of the building into the gathering itself. He is resplendent in his borrowed garb, almost (not quite) to the manner born. Innate arrogance and hostility substitute for true self-confidence in such an environment. Scarred fingers worry at square cufflinks, black onyx in a bed of silver: that much, like the guns at hip and strapped to the ankle, is real.
The scene: a party. The players: Rossi and Magneto. The clothing: tuxedos, because sometimes even the cop puts on a tie and penguin suit. Parenthetically, the %R is a terrible temptation to me. I abuse it mercilessly. Pity the paragraph.
I've mentioned this before, but it's fairly common for me to start out a scene with an objective in mind, or at least an image: a picture of a situation, which I arrange in the set, and then let go. It's like winding up a top and then dropping it on the X that you marked out on the table; it starts out where you want, but then you're pretty much at the mercy of whatever happens next. It's fairly rare that this sort of preconceived scenario fails to prove entertaining or worthwhile, which I think is a result of having an image in mind, rather than an intention. That is to say, I rarely go into scenes with the idea, "I want this and this to happen." This is a problem for Xavier, since a lot of his scenes are precisely that type. On the other hand, Rossi's scenes tend to be exactly the opposite. In general, the predestined kinds of scenes feel extraordinarily artificial, and as a result tend to bring out my very worst RP, since I don't feel at liberty to go wherever I might care to go as the character. It's the difference between scripted and impromptu, I guess: one is John Stewart; the other is Stephen Colbert. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with either -- I just happen to be better at the latter.
In this particular case, we ended up -- this is only how I recall it, not necessarily how it happened, a distinction I should make clear since my recollection almost never has anything to do with reality -- trying to figure out a situation where Rossi and Magneto would run into each other while dressed in evening wear. Rossi does not wear evening wear during the normal course of his day. Imagine that. I did suggest that he visit Magneto at the Hellfire Club, but that idea was rejected. MAGNETO'S SUCH A SPOILSPORT.
Fortunately, we remembered that cops often rent themselves out as security for private events, as a source of extra income. Perfect. And since Magneto wouldn't let us use the Hellfire Club, (go figure!) we decided on a private event during which Magneto would naturally show up: namely, a collection of like-minded, wealthy anti-mutants. He is there to listen to conversations and to memorize faces, making up a Santa's Little Helper list of Who's Who on the Naughty list.
Rossi's reason for being there is not that far different, although his list is probably less likely to end up in casualties. Events like this mean sympathizers for the Friends get together, and conversations that might end up in leads that end up in him getting a little bit closer to Tom. He's been quiet about it, but he's still after the Friends; it's unusual for him to take private gigs like this -- he dislikes them on principle for himself, though tolerant of them for his coworkers, knowing that other people with family and dependants have financial burdens he doesn't -- but this is an event that he wouldn't miss, given the opportunity. He traded with Ken Yamaguchi for the gig.
He's a fish out of water, to put it mildly. Old, rich white men are a different class than he is; he and Shaw connected on the blue collar level, if on very little else: he has absolutely /nothing/ in common with these people. However, he is a reverse snob, so sheer chutzpah and contempt for the upper classes carries him through. The jacket is rented. The cuff links are not. There's a story behind the cuff links; they are an inheritance from his maternal grandfather, Piero. When Rossi decided, without any explanation whatsoever, to leave the seminary. The rest of the family roared and raged about it, demanding reasons that he refused to give. His decision to enter the Police Academy was met with a complicated mixture of pride and disappointment by his relatives. His grandfather was the only one who simply accepted both decisions without comment.
In a family as outspoken as the Rossi family, lack of comment is sometimes more noticeable than noise.
Magneto is comfortable. Oddly so, all things considered -- his posture prim and upright beneath the close-tailored lines of tux, cuffs, and collar. He sips as he prints face after wrinkled face into his memory. He says little and does less. UNTIL. Until weaponry accompanied by familiar metal repair work crosses through the wide open space ahead. The slightest of magnetic buzzes traces through the latter. And then the earpiece goes silent.
The detective stumbles a little, a shiver interrupting his smooth stride. It takes a moment longer for him to register the earbud's silence -- reports are not ongoing, after all, and the partygoers are not the wildest of bunches. He stops on the edge of the floor, his hand going to his ear. Eyes harden under the swift lowering of eyelids; his gaze skips hastily around the room. Old men. Old men everywhere. He turns, searching, his right hand checked over the panel of his tuxedo coat.
And here Magneto thought it would be a boring party. Look! A party favor! And it's all wrapped up in shiny ribbons!
There's something about having magnetism hum through your metallic attachments that sort of grabs your attention. It's months before he actually tells Erik that it hurts when he does it; in the short term, the ache is still so regular that the additional interference doesn't really make that big a difference. Of course Magneto fits in with this crowd. Rich, white, old, powerful, bigoted men -- it fits him to a T. Except for a little quirk of the genes, he'd be one of them in fact instead of fiction.
Rossi rather leaps to an assumption here, but it's not particularly creative or even inspired. The destruction of communication devices in Magneto's immediate vicinity is sort of his hallmark. Rossi has gone through more cell phones than ... well, let's just say that it's turned into a nontrivial expense for him. The combination of that odd shiver in his bones, combined with the fffft of his earpiece? The only way Magneto could make himself more obvious is by throwing an SUV through the party and doing a strip tease on the remains.
I have this image of Rossi sort of spinning in place, in the way that they do in movies when the camera moves around the central figure while he turns in the other direction. Percy's player was mentioning a while back that if Percy had his way, Rossi would be dead, but since the White King and White Queen can't seem to keep themselves from messing with the guy, what the hell can he do? And it's true. To not poke a stick at Rossi would be an act of supreme willpower on Magneto's part, I think. He seems to get this unaccountable glee from messing with the poor man -- and the thing with being an omega mutant terrorist: willpower is something that other people have to worry about.
One corner of Erik's mouth curls gently upward over the rim of his glass when Rossi turns. He swallows the rest of his champagne, drops his glass, and pushes away from the wall at his back to enter the bare edge of the light cast off by one of the room's few sources. The shadows it casts beneath brows, nose, and jaw briefly make his identity unmistakeable, but in half a beat, he is gone again. Moving forward.
Bodies everywhere -- but somewhere along the line, Rossi has learned to recognize the way the man moves. Familiarity snipes at the periphery of his vision, and he turns his head sharply to track it, too late. More bodies herd. His hand contracts, the ring on its finger winking dull, sullen red in a bed of gold. With a muttered apology he pushes through guests, a dog on the hunt for an old, canny lion. His other hand grabs at a fellow officer in passing. He murmurs: what? Something. The guard looks after him, blank.
Another tremor. A ghostly touch, hardly there at all. Erik is having no trouble at all keeping tabs on his detective, for all the apparent trouble the detective is having in attempting to keep tabs on /him/. He circles around wide, prowling again at the party's edges to avoid the odd glance thrown his way. The occasional stalled conversation as somebody /wonders/ drifts in his wake, but most of them shake it off, and his track finally begins to curve in after Christopher.
Rossi pauses nearly in the center of the room, turning in circles once more to track the source of that unnerving, familiar tickle in his bones. His face is intent, professional, stripped clean of extraneous irritation. Ignore, please, the quick leap of a muscle in his jaw and the way cords stand out in his throat as he scopes out the room, a wary dervish in the middle of luxury. Passersby eye him askance and mutter behind their hands. Really, it's impossible to find good hired help these days.
He pauses. He stares through a mass of bodies, eyes narrowed. Shoulders stiffen. He does not need speech to say it. Where. The. Fuck.
Oh, Erik. What fun he is having! The player, as I recall, was chortling to himself about it -- and Magneto himself is not that far from it, either. It's rather like blind man's bluff, with Rossi as the blind man; Magneto is having the fun of poking a stick at him without ever having to come close enough to get barked at. It's the same sort of instinct that makes small children reach out and poke things when they've been expressly told DO NOT TOUCH. A way of asserting independence, defiance, power, control -- in a way, it's rather petty. This is not a playing field on which Rossi can ever fight back. On the other hand, it's also almost affectionate. After all, the kind of damage that Magneto could do to him, given his metallic fittings, is quite severe and definitely painful.
Even Erik's meta refers to Rossi as "Christopher." How he hates that name.
A few short meters away, Erik is enjoying himself with a touch here from one direction - a prod there, from another. He is distinguished from those around him, now, stiff shoulders and cold eyes squared directly to Rossi where the others mingle at all angles around him. A rock in the bigot stream.
Erik may be the man with the feather, but Rossi makes a very bad kitten. He twitches first one way or another, answering those little pokes of magnetism, then sinks his heels into the ground and makes one last circuit. A shift in the current; a knot in the flow of bodies. Green eyes sweep past Magneto, widen marginally, then swing back. You. Chris's mouth moves in a soundless, four-letter word. It requires no imagination at all to interpret it.
Yes. Erik smiles thin when Christopher finally manages to get a lock. The lazy hand he lifts for an odd sort of half-wave is accompanied by a more forceful magnetic shove back into the clump of aging baby boomers at Rossi's back.
Oh, yes. Petty. And somehow, in my mind anyway, not directed solely at Chris, but more at the people behind him; in a sense, it seems like Chris is the collateral damage so he can embarrass the dignity of the bigots that are in the room. Don't mind me, Chris. Let me just borrow your body for a second. (Leer.) Of course, I could be totally misreading that. Chris, on the other hand, has no problems taking that shove personally. Asshole.
Magneto allows Rossi to find him, plainly -- it's obvious by the fact that he's stopped moving -- but the stance and the description of 'cold eyes' sort of sits at odds with the playfulness of the way he's taunting the man. The physicality suggests a lingering mood based on his company and the people he's surrounded by; the playfulness of the pokes, half-malicious, half-humorous, suggest more the relationship that he has with Chris himself.
Chris staggers back. The gathering of older men behind him, knocked like bowling pins by the more solid weight of the NYPD ball, breaks apart with a crash of dropped glasses and scattered hors d'oeuvres. They are well-bred bigots, at least. Their immediate expostulations are well-modulated, and notable for severe, restrained eloquence. The cop pays no attention. Sleeve dampened by champagne, a stray fried prawn pawed off his lapel, he bulldogs his way forward towards Erik, a hand readied to catch the man by the elbow. Body language. Let's you and me go for a walk, ASSHOLE.
Not quite anticipating such a /direct/ response, Erik is caught somewhat by surprise, and has no time to do anything more than pull his arm belatedly out of the way, leaving his upper arm and back more accessable than the backwards jab of his elbow. And still, he chuckles. Christopher is displeased. He has made a fuss. Things could be worse.
My pose is not very elegant, to put it mildly. In fact, ignore it. From time to time I pose well! This is not one of those times. (I say that and immediately find scraps there that are not entirely suckitude: 'prawn pawed off', 'bulldogs his way'-- no, that's it.)
It's a fairly recent thing that I've started to reflect the character's name the way that I do: Chris for those who know him well enough to think of him that way (not even for Magneto will I pose 'Christopher'); Rossi for those who know him that way. There's an informality about both names that refer to the man himself -- that is to say, calling him 'Chris' or 'Rossi' doesn't necessarily indicate a level of intimacy with him that's greater than any other -- but there is, I think, a quality of /cop/ to the Rossi name when I pose with it, one that isn't there when I call him Chris. In a previous commentary I made a note about the fact that Erik's player shifts between the two personas, Erik and Magneto, and that the indications are there in the pose's name choice. For Rossi, it's a little different. There are very few people for whom he's the person first and the cop second, although -- now that I write that, I realize that's inaccurate. The cop and the man are almost inextricably linked, in fact, so much so that it's an actual effort for him not to be the cop and just be the man. It's not a healthy lifestyle, and certainly contributes to his problems with personal vulnerability and exposure. The people with whom I pose "Chris" rather than "Rossi" (Storm, Magneto... I think that's about it, actually) are the people around whom he's more man than cop. Which is to say, the cop is buried a little bit deeper than it normally is at other times.
Like I said, though, this doesn't mean squat in terms of emotional or mental intimacy.
That said, why Chris with Magneto, of all people, when the cop seems to be -- or should be -- more in supremacy than with almost anyone else? Good question. It's a dangerous truth that familiarity breeds contempt, and even though /contempt/ might not be the correct word, there's certainly a ... maybe a flippancy? No. A casualness to Rossi's dealings with the man that is not /safe/. He's encountered Magneto too often and gotten away with too much; he still respects the power, but he no longer fears the man. In other words, Magneto has managed to become Erik in Chris's eyes: he's the man rather than the criminal. It's a deadly sort of familiarity, for lack of a better word, and one that he'll suffer for when he encounters AU Magneto. There are times when he forgets (not completely, but enough!) that Erik is Magneto, cop-killer.
Magneto should be proud of this. It's what he wanted, after all. Isn't it? All this time cultivating Rossi, arguing at him, showing up in his apartment just to drink his whiskey and be a shit-- it's all part of that ongoing attempt to make himself real in Chris's eyes, right? Right?
Stained and rumpled as Chris is, he is not so foolhardy as to manhandle Erik Lensherr, Master of Magnetism, Magneto himself, out of a crowded party.
No, wait. He is.
"Outside," Chris orders, his arm reaching to sling around Erik's shoulders, the image of a man meeting an old (old, old, old!) buddy by surprise. Teeth flash in the quick slash of a smile; if it has a somewhat harder edge than true affability might demand, well. Who can blame him? "How about we check out the balcony? The view's a hoot."
Decidedly more comfortable and confident in treacherous waters, Erik has no compunctions about pushing an arm of his own around Rossi's back in return. He is clean cut and well-groomed, grizzled beard grazed close to his jaw and silver hair neatly styled, and he moves with dignity and grace despite the parasite he has acquired. "As you wish. Are you alright? You seem distressed."
Parasite. hahaha!
(twat.)
Yet again, a bad pose on my part. Yet again, an awesome one on Magneto's. It's not so much the phrasing that stands out with Erik's poses as it is what he /does/ with them. Erik's player has a gift for bringing out the unexpected, for concentrating on details that I tend to skip right by because I'm ... sort of lazy, to be honest, but also because I'm just not very observant. Also, sometimes Erik's player just has a /way/ with words. 'grizzled beard grazed close to his jaw' for instance. And the fact that he quite companionably puts his arm around Rossi, which is a less obtrusive (certainly a less /violent/) way of letting Chris know, yes, you can steer me, but only because I let you! Hi, friend! You're a funny little cockroach!
"Can't imagine why," Chris says -- almost sings, his harsh baritone growing briefly melodious -- as he steers their steps towards the french doors nearby. He stiffens but submits to Erik's arm, the line of his jaw carved out by a rough chisel. He, too, is clean cut and well-groomed, hair in order, jaw shaved, and if his stalk is a little stiff-legged and more reminiscent of a suspicious rottweiler's than a man heading out for a smoke with his best pal, surely he can be excused. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Celebrating the mutant problem?" Erik tries without real hope for deception, his brows lifted and innocent. What else would he be doing here? "I must say, I am surprised to see /you/ here. I am almost /certain/ that you socialize with the afflicted on a reasonably regular basis." Erik gestures the french doors open a little carelessly with a flick of his free hand.
Chris says with fresh exasperation, "I need the money, and you never know what kind of low-lifes show up to these things. You never heard of subtlety?" It fails as a reproach, given that it emerges as more of a lyric than a question. He steps up his pace out of the room. The night outside is cool and sweet, the day's heat having given way to a pleasant breeze and night-blooming flowers. With the socializing taking place inside, the balcony is empty of company; broad and terraced, it looks out over a steep hill of equally expensive homes and views.
"However do you determine what qualifies as a 'low-life' in these conditions?" Much as they opened, the doors sweep silently closed after them, dimming conversation and music to little more than a muffled murmer behind them. Has Erik ever heard of subtlety? Perhaps not. He drops the arm he has around Christopher and moves to step away for the balcony's ornate railing. "I will hire you, if you are in such dire need."
Erik's such a mensch.
I'd forgotten that at the time this log took place, Chris was still suffering from the BTP effect: namely, he starts to sing when he gets angry. It's had a salutatory effect on him; sheer embarrassment has forced him to learn to moderate his temper, and he's finally taken to heart some of the anger management exercises that his shrink has lectured him about. Unfortunately, there are still moments when the melodic theme forces its way into his voice, and he usually requires a second to calm himself down before continuing. Not, mind you, a luxury that he always has when he's on the job.
It's nice of Erik that he even bothers to answer Chris, when the question is really almost rhetorical. Of course Chris knows what Magneto's doing here; it's a futile hope that the leader of the Brotherhood (ex or not) would decide to extend the olive branch of friendship to a bunch of anti-mutant bigots. The fact that Erik bothers to answer at all, even flippantly, indicates that Erik is in a fairly balmy mood, all things considered. He doesn't freeze Chris out with a stare, which is what he would do in his less tolerant moods. Messing with his favorite cop appears to have put him in good humor!
Erik even decides to be cordial. The remark he makes about being surprised to see Chris there is actually conversational. There's an invitation there to more conversation, actual engagement of two guys hanging out, so to speak, even if one of them is annoyed as hell. Chris is often annoyed when Erik is around. This is fact. But it's rare that Magneto gets to take an active hand in making Chris irritable, when usually it's his sheer presence that does it. This time he got to poke with the stick first: in a way, Chris's mood is his brain child. He seems to take a certain quaint pleasure and pride in that.
"The Friends, in case you were wondering," Chris bites out through gritted teeth. His voice jangles, melody battling with monotone, with mixed success. He closes fists around the iron of the railing and leans, stiff-armed, to frown across the landscape. "Thanks for the offer, but I'll pass. You still owe me a good leather overcoat. Not to mention a fucking car."
"The Friends of Humanity? /Here/? What a terrible coincidence." Brows knit, theatrically muddled, Erik braces his hands firmly against cool iron as he too peers harshly out over the lay of the land. "I could simply destroy the entire building."
Still playful, but not really. The suggestion that he could destroy the building is facetious, but ... it isn't really, is it? No, it probably is. (Is it?) Chris hasn't the luxury of treating it as a joke; Erik's past history is variable enough that he could very well mean it. The remark cools Chris down faster than almost anything else could. His temper isn't great, yes, but when it comes to the job, he's a professional: personal feelings take a back seat -- mostly. He can't think straight when he's angry, which is both his strength and his weakness. Ororo worries about him, and with good reason. He doesn't have the kind of self-preservation that he should have; he's capable of taking risks out of sheer temper that most people would never even consider, and his instincts when it comes to personal risk are wildly out of whack with actual mortality.
When he's being a professional, on the other hand, he actually calculates. Mind supercedes emotion. It's mostly when other people are at risk that he manages to get that kind of self-control: when people other than himself are dependent on what he does. Bizarrely, Ororo is really bad for him in this regard; when he was with Leah, who was terribly vulnerable, he actually managed to control his tendency to take risks far more, because she needed him to protect her. If he ever had a family, he'd be far less dangerous in his personal life: again, there would be dependents who he'd be responsible for. Ororo, on the other hand, is not a dependent; she doesn't need him -- and how -- and in fact, she's far more likely to rescue him than the other way around. He therefore feels no restraint. Barring his family, who are fine without him, he's got nobody relying on him when he's not on the job. He has a peculiar lack of value for his own well-being, which isn't really all that surprising when you factor in his childhood. For an arrogant SOB, he also has a quaint lack of self-worth.
I've mentioned before that Erik has a great sense of theater. He's got a flair for the dramatic, and an equal flair for the ridiculous. His sarcasm here is hilarious. Friends of Humanity? Here? Among rich bigots? Gosh. /Golly/. /Really/?
Chris's hands tighten. Knuckles press white through the scarred skin. "You could," he says. His voice shivers a little, stapled down at the edges, and he glances askance at Erik with eyes made colorless by the dark. Dryly, he adds, "I'd rather you didn't."
Magneto's, in turn, are bleached light by what little moon there is to see by. They knife from the open space beyond the balcony to Rossi, and then back out again. Calculating.
"Don't," Chris says, the word stark and sharp. A little less abruptly, he adds, "Or else I'll start singing again, and -- Christ on a pogo stick, I don't think I could stand that."
It does not require telepathy to read Magneto's mind. Why doesn't he throw Chris over the balcony anyway? It would cut the conversation short, for one thing, and Erik wouldn't have come out onto the balcony with Chris if he didn't want to talk. Not when there were other ways to get rid of him. Of all the people in the building, it's Rossi that he has most -- connection to, for lack of a better word. They'll never be equals, but they can see eye to eye in an odd, perverse way. They're both men of principle, honorable in their own ways.
Also, you know. Rossi's hot and Mags totally wants him.
I like the shorter, clipped quality of the last two poses. They move from the more elegant, classical flow of the party into the starker parity of the balcony. Less circus show, more substance, and that's reflected in the pose structure, I think. Mags is excellent at cadence and pacing, something that I'm not as skilled at. I tend to stay stationary in a certain pose length and pose structure, out of habit or -- I don't know. Bad RP? On the other hand, Mags is really good about steering the course of pose length and imagery so that it reflects the general mood and atmosphere of what's happening. He's also a master of silence, which is something that Chris is ... not uncomfortable with, exactly. He uses it a lot! It's his player that occasionally has trouble with it, coming from an older RP tradition. Magneto is very much defined by his silences, I think; the player uses them to convey gravitas, threat, weariness, cynicism, contempt -- all sorts of things. Rossi's version of that is motion and sound, the more obvious forms of physicality.
A slow breath gruffed through his sinuses, Erik firms his grip about the iron in it until the metal conforms to the shape of his hand, creaking mild protest that is lost easily enough in an oncoming breeze.
The detective does not breathe for a moment, his shoulders rising around his ears, then exhales with a impatient jerk of the same. He props his elbows on the railing and knits his fingers loosely together to scowl out at the dark. There is silence for a little while. It is not, perhaps, entirely restful.
"It would look like an accident."
Chris's hands make fists. "I haven't recognized any Friends inside."
"You didn't recognize any terrorists either." Erik turns his head slowly to narrow cold eyes along the railing at Rossi.
Not for a second would Rossi believe that his request that Erik /not/ blow up the building in any way influenced his decision not to. And he'd be right. (At least, I assume he'd be right.) There's a question: if he'd asked, would Erik have done it? Hmm.
Silence is something that Chris is learning to accept from Erik. He /can/ learn! It just takes him a while sometimes. He can be remarkably stupid. He's learned that sometimes it's just not wise to keep talking; given enough silence, Erik will sometimes just talk himself down. I can't remember where it was that he learned that lesson -- when talking simply made the matter worse, with additional injury to himself. It's a toss-up whether he considers the trade worth the pain. If he keeps talking, there's a risk that Magneto will hurt /him/. On the other hand, hurting Rossi means that he's distracted from his original intention--
Okay. This is making Rossi sound like a total self-martyring sap. Rossi is not prone to martyrdom; in a lot of critical, irritating ways, he's quite possibly one of the most self-centered people on the grid. On the other hand, he also has some serious blind spots. He would writhe if he were in any way aware that putting himself in danger's way could be interpreted as self-sacrificial.
Erik wages a continuous battle between his humanity and his ruthless ideal. He's torn more than most: he's faced with regret if he does what he thinks he should do; and he's faced with regret if he doesn't do what he thinks he should do. The playful mood is entirely wiped out, from the second that Chris decided to take Erik's suggestion of destroying the building seriously. If he'd shrugged it off, answered in kind, would the good mood have continued? Maybe. (Mags?) I speculate that the fact that Chris didn't take it as a joke, that he actually treated it as a valid threat, not only shifted the quality of the conversation from guys just hanging out and messing with each other to cop and mutant, as well as reminding Magneto that he's there for a /reason/ and he has a /cause/ and he's got a /responsibility/ that he's been failing all this time by /not/ killing the people who should be killed to make the world a better place. In short, that he's failed by letting his better nature win over his baser.
It wouldn't be a surprise if he took that complicated mess of self-blame and resentment and turned it onto Chris.
(Haha. Like how I keep saying "Erik is doing--" like I have the slightest clue what's going on? I belatedly insert a disclaimer here: these are completely speculations on my part. Erik is not played by me. All my statements and declarations are my own perspective on what Erik is doing and saying, and I don't know dick.)
Teeth show bright, moon-flecked. It is not a smile. Chris straightens, less spry than in months past. "You want to wipe out an entire building full of people on the off chance you might get someone who doesn't like mutants."
"None of them like mutants, or haven't you been paying attention?" Erik pushes off the railing, a restless military pace carrying him close to the balcony's middle.
"People change their minds." Chris's voice bites, the Brooklyn accent bleeding across his baritone. Not irritation so much as -- strain, perhaps. He shoves his hands in his pockets, ruining the line of his jacket. "Bunch of bored rich people. Today they swing one way, tomorrow they swing another. You don't kill people just because they don't like you."
"Government revolves around the wealthy. You are fooling yourself if you believe that nothing will come of these gatherings." Squared hands closed into fists, Erik pauses only briefly before brooding onward to the opposite end of the balcony. "I am under no obligation to explain myself to you."
Erik says that, but then he explains himself anyway, part of his ongoing campaign to convert Chris into -- what? Absolution? Understanding? I doubt that Erik is even aware of this obscure need anymore, beyond maybe a fleeting irritation that he keeps going back to Chris like an old girlfriend.
The fact that Chris has pushed the conversation (and the threat, let's put blame where blame is due) into the real of the serious means that it can't really sway back to the humorous give and take of earlier. Erik isn't really trying to convince Chris here; he already knows better than to think that he can convince Chris. Instead, it sounds more like he's trying to convince himself, talk himself into an action or chastising himself for not doing it. Chris is just along for the ride.
Rossi knows the truth of what Erik is saying: rich people make law. And the stuff he says in turn is like white noise. He states the obvious, to a person who doesn't operate in the realm of the obvious.
Chris's hands dig fiercely into his pockets. He watches Erik under lowered brows, eyes wary in a blank face. "You're the one who's talking," he says. "You tear this place down, a hundred more will pop up to replace each one who dies."
"I will kill them too," says the man who has not really bothered with killing anyone who did not very much deserve it in quite some time, now. Back turned to Rossi, Erik braces back against the railing and scowls.
"Ever hear about an eye for an eye and the whole world's blind?" The cop takes a step back, measuring the gap between himself and Erik with critical eyes. They knife from the open space beyond the balcony to Erik, and then back out again. Calculating. He sinks his shoulders into the doorposts and waits, frame tight.
"No." Erik has not. He remains upright and rigid. Noble, perhaps, although certainly lacking something. "I suspect that anyone who has the time on their hands to sit around and think of those sorts of things does not have any idea of what they are talking about."
GANDHI, YOU FUCKWIT. GANDHI.
It's sad how poorly educated the older generation is.
It just occurred to me that there's something almost Rogue-ish about the "I will kill them too," from Magneto. It's an almost petulant retort, like a teenager threatening to chop his nose off to spite his face or ... uh, some much better conceived corollary that I can't come up with right now.
I haven't written a lot about the poses in this commentary because ... I don't know why. It's too late now. If you're interested about my pontificating about poses and stylings and word choices and all that, you can check out my other commentaries. This one is the first one I've done in ages, so it's a bit rough. Sorry, Mags! I also haven't talked a whole lot about Chris's mood during this scene, which is a weird omission on my part. He has no sense of humor. It's awful, isn't it? He's ... I don't know. His emotions about his encounters with Magneto are increasingly ambiguous; he's nowhere near as cranky about them as he seems. He's certainly not happy about the pain that seems to come with them, inevitably, but there's a quality of -- expansion, I guess I should say, or challenge, that he doesn't get from many people but Emma, maybe. He's forced by Magneto to keep his eyes wide open, to force his mind open to anticipate the unexpected and the illogically logical. And he's discovered over time that the best way to deal with Magneto, the most brutal and effective way to keep Magneto interested, diverted, distracted, what-have-you, is by exposing his vulnerabilities and making himself more human to Erik. It's painful for him! It's not natural for a man of Chris's stamp to open himself to friends, much less enemies.
There's a completely irrational part of him, a tiny, minute leftover from Father Christopher, that keeps thinking that if he says the right thing or triggers the right thought, he'll be able to bring Erik in from beyond the pale. To jail, yes, but! That's better than the alternative, right?
I don't remember why Chris was measuring the space between them; it was a callback, I think, to the original glance that Magneto did to measure the distance between Chris and the balcony's edge.
Chris chuffs a quiet snort, the ring on his finger winking as he scrubs at the lower half of his face. "Gandhi," he supplies. "Mahatma. Skinny Indian guy. Sat around and pissed off the British. You don't strike me as the Boddhisatva type," he allows, slouching a little more comfortably against the wood. "Or whatever it is that the Hindus call it. You don't ever get tired of blowing shit up and killing people?"
Magneto frowns harder, attention turned firmly inward despite the ongoing scrape of his eyes over the surrounding hills. "Mahatma Gandhi was a human." So there. "I tire of being ineffectual."
Silence answers him. It is watchful. Alive. A hunted animal learns to recognize the footsteps of its enemy. "If I were a priest," Chris says, "I'd tell you to go to confession. Burden of sins, and all that jazz."
"I trust that God is fully aware of what I have done and what I have wished to do." As his transgressions are glaring and plentiful. He probably has an entire album of Magneto-involved transgressions that requires constant maintinence to remain up to date. Erik tucks his scruffed chin to scowl down at the bony curl of his knuckles around the railing.
Chris drags himself up against the wall. Inside, near the closed door, masculine voices rise in a small debate that barely scratches the surface of argument, hampered as it is by pure civility. "Road to hell and good intentions," he says. He ambles forward again, limping a little, to lean on the same railing that supports Erik. "It takes more than a generation to make a change, man. They've barely started. It's only been, what. A decade since people found out about mutations?"
That phrase, "I tire of being ineffectual," worries Chris more than anything that has gone before. Because a threat of a specific action is one thing; a generalized statement like that, from a man who once blew out most of the city? He's unpredictable and he's powerful and he's dangerous, and he's having some sort of end-of-life crisis. And the most immediate target to hand is Chris. He jokes from time to time that someday Erik will kill him, and while some part of him has become complacent to some extent about his safety where Erik is concerned, fundamentally he actually believes it. One day Erik will remember that he's Magneto, and that Chris is just a human, and will use the metal that Xavier School stuck in him to rip him apart.
The Italian in him appreciates the morbid irony of that possibility.
I'm so not thrilled with my poses in this scene. Please ignore them. Pay attention to Magneto. The way Magneto dismisses Mahatma Gandhi just because he was human (so there) is just hilarious to me. I mentioned before about Magneto's flair for the comedic, right?
Edit to add: ...oh. I remember I was going to mention this. Chris's use of the word, 'man,' -- "It takes more than a generation to make a change, man." -- It's a level of casualness that he hasn't used with Erik before, though it may not look like it since that kind of thing is embedded in his normal speech patterns. It's an indicator, as much as anything else, that he's got a dangerous level of personal complacency regarding Magneto's attitude towards him; the fact that that doesn't extend to Erik's /actions/ is a separate issue. Don't ask how he can fear the actions and not the man -- it makes no sense to me either, but it probably works better if you consider it as hating the sin but not the sinner.
Magneto gives Chris a look that is unmistakably skeptical and condescending. He is young and stupid and human, worst of all. "Ah, well, When you phrase it just so--" Erik pushes back from the railing and turns back for the doors, "I will be in my apartment, drawing up plans for world peace."
And yet Magneto continues to haunt him, like a boil on his backside. A boil in thigh-high boots. Chris straightens. "I'll see you out," he says, falling into step beside Erik, and -- because he is young and stupid and human, worst of all -- slings his arm around Magneto's shoulders, a buddy, a pal, a mensch. "Maybe we can get you some of those little crab puffs on the way."
He is not so tolerant this time. Coarse and irritable, Erik pistons a bony elbow into Rossi's gut in time with a shoulder-driven shove whose message is fairly clear. He is no longer in the mood.
The detective is a solid enough mass, but bony elbows, well. Chris, already reaching for the doors, lets out a whoosh of air at that unfriendly gesture. Mean! He hiccups, coughing through the unexpected exhalation: a so-dignified picture to present to the room inside as one of the french doors swings open. Startled, mild eyes frown at the incoming pair. Honestly. The /quality/ of Security these days--
Magneto does not so much as spare Christopher a glance over his shoulder. He pushes in through the open door and onward with broad shoulders braced against anyone foolhardly enough to cross his path. Where he goes, nobody knows!
I'm tired now. I don't want to write anymore. DONE.