8/12/07 - Storm
---
"--not my kind of movie," the baritone says, preceding the speaker up the sidewalk. The echoes of his voice ricochet off the brick walls, muting it in its own answering sine wave. "Why didn't she want the kids to practice magic again?"
The night is warm, almost stiflingly so, and windows hum along the block, filled with the blocks of personal air conditioners. There are bodies abroad, even at this hour at the week's beginning; they sit in groups on stoops, engaged in quiet conversation, or in drinking, or even in unlikely stargazing. Impossible to see the heavens in the city's pollution of light, but their heads tip up nonetheless. Stars are falling, somewhere.
Chris ambles up the sidewalk in civilian clothes, jeans and T-shirt a concession to the weather. One hand is shoved in his pocket; the other, courteous, offers a civilized support to his companion. "Bad management," he says, answering himself. "Used to have a Lieutenant like that."
"Bureaucracy." Ororo is amused and the notes of mirth warm her low voice. Immune to the dredge of heat and humidity, she walks blithely at Chris's side and only realizes the weather in a clinical way. Her skirt flares pink around her knees as she walks, neat sandals and a slightly lacy cream-white sleeveless top completing the casually pretty effect for which she aims. "Did your lieutenant have a similar affection for kittens?"
"Probably ate them in his spare time," Chris says, steering them around a cadre of young would-be gangbangers, who sit skinnily white and embarrassed in loose clothing unconvincingly ghetto. He spares them only the barest of glances, his attention tucked frowning through the same abstraction that has dogged his evening. "Not big on people smarter or better than he was. --Should've picked a better movie. Sorry."
"Harry Potter is popular with the students." Ororo's smile flickers warm towards him, and then her glance skips away again. She pays little heed to most of the human environment that surrounds them, walking with a fluid ease that may or may not be entirely genuine. "I've seen most of the others, although not in theaters. Just in the rec room over the past few years. I think they believe in some ... affinity."
Chris's snort is a chopped and abrupt sound, spun through the filter of a distracted amusement. "Wizards and mutants. I can see that. Xavier's is Hogwarts. What does that make you?" He tips a sidelong glance at the elegant profile beside his, heavy brows hiking quizzically. "Professor Mac--what's her name?"
"It doesn't line up properly," Ororo says, lifting her chin slightly as she turns a thoughtful glance out across the sidewalk and the street. "I believe that Jean is properly Minerva, but I have no idea where I fit." She sighs a little.
Green eyes flicker under the flood of a street light. His building lies just beyond, in a small crater of darkness. He turns their steps towards the empty stoop, disengaging to drop onto the lower rank of stairs. "We still talking about the movie?"
Ororo folds her arms over her chest as they come to a stop, and cants her head slightly to one side. Her hair gleams silver-light, haloing her head in the glow of the lamp. "More or less," she says. Her lashes lower over her eyes.
Chris stretches over the stairs, making a city-bred seat of them: elbows on knees, hands loosely clasped, shoulders pressed up through the thin fabric of his shirt. "Or less," he says, and grins up at her, awareness engaged for a split-second in the here and now. "Ask the kids. Or tell them where you belong."
Ororo gestures with a flicker of her fingers and ducks her head. "Whatever else I am," she says, "I'm their teacher." If there's more to say she doesn't add anything else; she lifts an eyebrow and studies his sprawl over the stairs with very vague amusement.
He engages to untangle a hand, just long enough to pat open-palmed on the concrete beside him. Join him. "And I'm a cop," he says, stitching wry humor into the identification. "It's like an after-school show. 'Today, on a very special episode of Punky Brewster--' Speaking of, got something for you."
"Punky Brewster," Ororo echoes with a slight furrow of her brow. She folds herself down onto the step, her knees both angled to the the side. She tugs idly on her skirt to better cover them, and lets her hands rest together in a loose clasp over her thighs. She looks the question to him rather than asking it, her brows lifted.
He lists to one side, fishing in jeans pockets; his face grows remote again in the seeking, attention unspooling to abstraction once more. Metal jingles. He straightens to spill keys into his palm. "In case you forget your lockpicks."
Her expression shifts, the questioning air bleeding away and leaving behind it a controlled sort of blankness: inscrutable, Ororo holds out one cupped hand for the keys.
"Not what you think." The keys tumble into her hand, hot from his body's warmth. "I'm gonna be gone for a while. Thought you could use some space away from the school."
Ororo holds them in silence for a long moment, still but for the slow lift of her other hand to clasp them in both. Her eyes fall away from his, blue shielded by dark lashes.
He does not deal well with silence. Not silence that is not of his own making. Hands, emptied, slide across each other as though to erase even the memory of sensation; beside her, the lean, slouched body stiffens, brushed in broad strokes of tension. "Few weeks," Chris says, and casts his gaze away again, towards the far end of the street. "Not sure how long it'll be. Sort of unexpected. I just figured--" The rest of the thought stumbles away, abruptly awkward.
Ororo holds to the quiet just a moment longer, and then pulls one hand away from the clasp over the keys to reach over and pull one of his into a clasp with hers. Wordless, she presses her palm to his and slides her fingers between his.
His mouth opens. He starts, and stops, then starts again. And then stops, blinking, uncertainty pitting the corners of his mouth. Warm fingers twine with hers, calluses and scars rough against her skin.
"Where?" Ororo asks finally, her voice quiet.
Discomfort hedges the laconic reply. "Just -- out." Shoulders hunch; it is meant to be a shrug.
To that Ororo says nothing. Her hand clasps his firmly, but her head turns away.
The black head drops into the scrub of a hand. Bristle scrapes against the palm, dragged down to close over the lower half of his face. Chris stares blankly at the sidewalk between his feet. "It's just a thing," he says at last, as though goaded. "It's just a stupid little thing. It'll just take a while, is all."
There is the shadow of a smile in her voice that doesn't touch her lips; if it touches her eyes, they are masked by the angle of her head. "You don't want to tell me what, where or how long," she says.
Chris exhales. "It's nothing," he says, and slides his thumb across the angle of hers. The Brooklyn accent broadens across his voice, inching towards a flippancy belied by his own leaf-dark eyes. "Not very fair to you. Want to dump my ass?"
Ororo answers this with more silence. Her mouth twitches up at one corner and she tips her head, reaching with her free hand to alleviate an itch inside her ear with her pinky. In turn, she lets out a long breath.
Her companion's head turns to watch this operation. An answering twitch of mouth briefly lightens his expresion, nudging it past jaded cynicism. The bowstring of his spine unbends. "Up to you."
Ororo finally turns her gaze to meet his. She cocks an eyebrow. Her eyes reflect, mostly, exasperation.
Green splinters behind lashes, black trimming around the shadowed color to hide much of its expression. "You gonna say something?"
"I don't know, Chris." Ororo's nose crinkles just slightly, and then she turns her glance away again, a puff of breath escaping her lips in a voiceless fragment of a laugh. "You're not really saying much."
"What do you want me to say?"
Ororo snorts.
Chris retrieves his hand from Ororo's to prop his chin on his thumbs, palms pressed together to splice his mouth behind fingers. A prayer's pose, if unreligious. Eyelids lower further still, making a scimitar's slice of bright eyes. "I'm having surgery," he says. Immediate regret chases the bite of words: too late to retrieve them. "Fuck."
Ororo shifts on the stair, turning to look at him with a quiet regard. Her knees tip towards him rather than away, and her elbows rest on her thighs, hands cradling his keys as she retrieves her own. "Is it serious?"
Shoulders hunch again. "In and out. No." He exhales against the barrier of his hands, then glances sidelong. The even beat of breathing quickens, if by a token; behind the lashes, eyes have dilated dark and hungry. "Yes. No. The fuck do I know. Anyway."
Ororo hesitates over these words or those and speaks neither. She shifts closer to him on the step, sliding over concrete and rumpling the flowy pink of her skirt as she tucks herself against his side with the solidity of her slender frame lending warmth and weight to quiet words. "I could stand outside your operating room," she says. "Threaten to hit the surgeons with lightning if they screw up."
"That's motivation for you," Chris says lightly, smile lines creasing at the corners of mouth and eyes: a sham that does not quite reach the eyes themselves. "They'll do fine. It'll be quick, and then I'll just need some time to recover. A few weeks, tops. Mom's place. She insisted." The emotion that humps across his baritone is all sharp angles and prickles, awkward and baffled by its own presence. "Was sort of hoping to slide it under the radar."
Ororo breathes out, gaze lowering again just slightly. "Under the radar," she repeats, low and a little dry. Her hair shivers silvery with the slightest shake of her head.
Chris says simply, "Not just yours," and digs fingers into the hollows of his eyes, tracing the rings of fatigue that draw them haggard. "Jesus. It's not that big a deal. I hate hospitals. I hate surgery. I hate the fucking drama."
Ororo lifts her and draws her fingertips lightly over his back. "I did not say it was a big deal," she says, her voice mild as her touch is gentle. "No drama. No flowers or amusing balloons or get well cards covered in children's signatures."
Green flares, rimmed by white. "Christ," Chris says for variation's sake. The word is startled. "Children's sig-- hadn't even thought of that. I'll be fine. Don't worry about me. Use the apartment as much as you want. Mike or John might pop by from time to time to check up on things, but otherwise, it's all yours."
"Chris." Ororo says the name quietly, with a thread of exasperation thinning her voice.
Chris closes his mouth and looks baffled. What?
Ororo shakes her head at him and doesn't really answer. "Bear in mind that I'm not dating you so that I can use your apartment to hide from students."
The black head drops, baring the line of nape and scar tissue. Over the angle of his arm, one green eye grins askance at Ororo. "I wasn't giving you keys because you're dating me, Cadbury. It's not a girlfriend thing. It's a friend thing. Savvy?"
"I'm not friends with you so that I can use your apartment to hide from students, either!" Ororo gives him a little shove, her hand to his shoulder.
"Perk of the gig," Chris says, unfurling just enough to shove lightly back, a bump of shoulder to shoulder. "Fuck, Cadbury. If you don't have any use for it, I'll pass them on to -- I don't know. Cassidy, maybe. Except I'm worried what he'd do in my bed."
"Maybe I'll pine while you're gone," Ororo muses idly, her arm draped over his back as she leans into him. "Sit in your apartment and pine."
Chris slides an arm around Ororo in turn, face pressing into her crown. "Pine," he says, and shivers in tattered humor. "Like some bad romance novel."
"I wouldn't know," Ororo says with dignity, though laughter thrums in her voice.
"Romance novel, you end up with some prince in the end," Chris guesses without real conviction. His breath tickles her ear. "That's how it works in the Disney movies. Kids go for that kind of shit. --Hey. If you meet someone while I'm out."
Ororo closes her eyes. "I won't have sex in your bed."
Chris says, gravely, "Appreciate that. Not quite what I meant, though."
Ororo grins, but then tips her head to look at him instead. "What did you mean?"
"I'm a pretty crappy boyfriend."
"Are you?"
"You don't got much frame of reference," Chris remembers belatedly, and straightens to slide fingertips across her cheek. "You're supposed to be treated better than this."
Ororo looks at him thoughtfully, almost curiously, but does not deny him the point; or, for that matter, speak at all.
Chris's hand drops away, falling to the chilling concrete step to straight-arm his lean back. Overhead, something moves in the heavens, a suggestion of a flare that dies almost as quickly as it is born. The Perseids wrestle with New York City, and lose.
"You've ideas for how I should be treated, then?" The question is almost, but not quite, amused. Ororo can hunt for starlight later; whatever she hunts now is less celestial.
"Me. You should have ideas." The reply, lobbed back, comes with the slight turn of head that presents Ororo with a three-quarters view of him, washed by the dull gold of street light. Chris's mouth curls. "Julia'll give you some, if you want. I don't know. What do /you/ want?"
"You're the one with supposed to." Ororo breathes a soft snort and glances away again. "I don't feel like having the answers to that."
His free hand starfishes through his hair, raking it into hedgehog prickles. "Mmf," Chris says, and sinks back to mold his spine to the angles of the stairs. "Most women want -- I don't know. Commitment. Emotional availability. Fidelity. In that order."
"Do I offer so much of those to you?" Ororo almost, but not quite, laughs. "Well, that last one, I suppose."
"Do I ask that much?" Chris asks, pillowing his head with an arm.
"What do you ask?" Ororo turns this around, with the swift flicker of a smile. "What do you want?"
A lazy smile tugs at the corners of Chris's mouth. His eyes close. "I don't feel like having the answers to that."
"Uh-huh." Ororo makes a face, which he can't see with his eyes closed, but the grimace is likely guessable. "You're much better at having questions."
"It's my job."
At this, Ororo again falls silent.
Eyes open at the silence. The night is awash in faded shades of gold. Chris grimaces at it; an expression not too far distant from Ororo's, earlier. "Sorry. I don't know what I want. Not from you: from anyone."
"Harder to get it, then," Ororo says, barely more than a murmur as she tips her head slightly to one side.
Chris's mouth opens, then shuts again. Another grimace, this one tighter, skidded off chagrin. His turn to fall silent.
Ororo shakes her head slightly, and then shifts: slowly, she scoots away and unfolds from the step. The breeze that washes over them both is gentle and cool, and entirely her doing. "Do you want to go to bed?"
There is another dim streak in the sky. Chris pushes off the steps, telescoping slowly, painfully, a wince marking aches forgotten and rediscovered in the short period of repose. "It's late," he agrees, and looks down at her, his hands shoving into pockets, his face tired and distracted. "You staying?"
"That was the idea," Ororo says, lifting her chin slightly with a smile's breath ghosting through her tone.
Chris gravely thrusts out his elbow, inviting with an inner city gentleman's panache. Join me?
Ororo answers with a low laugh and the hook of her arm through his. Join him, she does.
The arm looped with hers is cool, but strong, and the stride that pushes them up the stairs has something in it of the old vigor. The door is propped open; he swings it open for her, doorman to a weather witch, and overhead, motes of stardust hurtle towards the earth in a rain of dying light.
There is a lesson there, for the unsubtle.
[Log ends]
Chris says good-bye to Ororo. Or at least -- till later?
"--not my kind of movie," the baritone says, preceding the speaker up the sidewalk. The echoes of his voice ricochet off the brick walls, muting it in its own answering sine wave. "Why didn't she want the kids to practice magic again?"
The night is warm, almost stiflingly so, and windows hum along the block, filled with the blocks of personal air conditioners. There are bodies abroad, even at this hour at the week's beginning; they sit in groups on stoops, engaged in quiet conversation, or in drinking, or even in unlikely stargazing. Impossible to see the heavens in the city's pollution of light, but their heads tip up nonetheless. Stars are falling, somewhere.
Chris ambles up the sidewalk in civilian clothes, jeans and T-shirt a concession to the weather. One hand is shoved in his pocket; the other, courteous, offers a civilized support to his companion. "Bad management," he says, answering himself. "Used to have a Lieutenant like that."
"Bureaucracy." Ororo is amused and the notes of mirth warm her low voice. Immune to the dredge of heat and humidity, she walks blithely at Chris's side and only realizes the weather in a clinical way. Her skirt flares pink around her knees as she walks, neat sandals and a slightly lacy cream-white sleeveless top completing the casually pretty effect for which she aims. "Did your lieutenant have a similar affection for kittens?"
"Probably ate them in his spare time," Chris says, steering them around a cadre of young would-be gangbangers, who sit skinnily white and embarrassed in loose clothing unconvincingly ghetto. He spares them only the barest of glances, his attention tucked frowning through the same abstraction that has dogged his evening. "Not big on people smarter or better than he was. --Should've picked a better movie. Sorry."
"Harry Potter is popular with the students." Ororo's smile flickers warm towards him, and then her glance skips away again. She pays little heed to most of the human environment that surrounds them, walking with a fluid ease that may or may not be entirely genuine. "I've seen most of the others, although not in theaters. Just in the rec room over the past few years. I think they believe in some ... affinity."
Chris's snort is a chopped and abrupt sound, spun through the filter of a distracted amusement. "Wizards and mutants. I can see that. Xavier's is Hogwarts. What does that make you?" He tips a sidelong glance at the elegant profile beside his, heavy brows hiking quizzically. "Professor Mac--what's her name?"
"It doesn't line up properly," Ororo says, lifting her chin slightly as she turns a thoughtful glance out across the sidewalk and the street. "I believe that Jean is properly Minerva, but I have no idea where I fit." She sighs a little.
Green eyes flicker under the flood of a street light. His building lies just beyond, in a small crater of darkness. He turns their steps towards the empty stoop, disengaging to drop onto the lower rank of stairs. "We still talking about the movie?"
Ororo folds her arms over her chest as they come to a stop, and cants her head slightly to one side. Her hair gleams silver-light, haloing her head in the glow of the lamp. "More or less," she says. Her lashes lower over her eyes.
Chris stretches over the stairs, making a city-bred seat of them: elbows on knees, hands loosely clasped, shoulders pressed up through the thin fabric of his shirt. "Or less," he says, and grins up at her, awareness engaged for a split-second in the here and now. "Ask the kids. Or tell them where you belong."
Ororo gestures with a flicker of her fingers and ducks her head. "Whatever else I am," she says, "I'm their teacher." If there's more to say she doesn't add anything else; she lifts an eyebrow and studies his sprawl over the stairs with very vague amusement.
He engages to untangle a hand, just long enough to pat open-palmed on the concrete beside him. Join him. "And I'm a cop," he says, stitching wry humor into the identification. "It's like an after-school show. 'Today, on a very special episode of Punky Brewster--' Speaking of, got something for you."
"Punky Brewster," Ororo echoes with a slight furrow of her brow. She folds herself down onto the step, her knees both angled to the the side. She tugs idly on her skirt to better cover them, and lets her hands rest together in a loose clasp over her thighs. She looks the question to him rather than asking it, her brows lifted.
He lists to one side, fishing in jeans pockets; his face grows remote again in the seeking, attention unspooling to abstraction once more. Metal jingles. He straightens to spill keys into his palm. "In case you forget your lockpicks."
Her expression shifts, the questioning air bleeding away and leaving behind it a controlled sort of blankness: inscrutable, Ororo holds out one cupped hand for the keys.
"Not what you think." The keys tumble into her hand, hot from his body's warmth. "I'm gonna be gone for a while. Thought you could use some space away from the school."
Ororo holds them in silence for a long moment, still but for the slow lift of her other hand to clasp them in both. Her eyes fall away from his, blue shielded by dark lashes.
He does not deal well with silence. Not silence that is not of his own making. Hands, emptied, slide across each other as though to erase even the memory of sensation; beside her, the lean, slouched body stiffens, brushed in broad strokes of tension. "Few weeks," Chris says, and casts his gaze away again, towards the far end of the street. "Not sure how long it'll be. Sort of unexpected. I just figured--" The rest of the thought stumbles away, abruptly awkward.
Ororo holds to the quiet just a moment longer, and then pulls one hand away from the clasp over the keys to reach over and pull one of his into a clasp with hers. Wordless, she presses her palm to his and slides her fingers between his.
His mouth opens. He starts, and stops, then starts again. And then stops, blinking, uncertainty pitting the corners of his mouth. Warm fingers twine with hers, calluses and scars rough against her skin.
"Where?" Ororo asks finally, her voice quiet.
Discomfort hedges the laconic reply. "Just -- out." Shoulders hunch; it is meant to be a shrug.
To that Ororo says nothing. Her hand clasps his firmly, but her head turns away.
The black head drops into the scrub of a hand. Bristle scrapes against the palm, dragged down to close over the lower half of his face. Chris stares blankly at the sidewalk between his feet. "It's just a thing," he says at last, as though goaded. "It's just a stupid little thing. It'll just take a while, is all."
There is the shadow of a smile in her voice that doesn't touch her lips; if it touches her eyes, they are masked by the angle of her head. "You don't want to tell me what, where or how long," she says.
Chris exhales. "It's nothing," he says, and slides his thumb across the angle of hers. The Brooklyn accent broadens across his voice, inching towards a flippancy belied by his own leaf-dark eyes. "Not very fair to you. Want to dump my ass?"
Ororo answers this with more silence. Her mouth twitches up at one corner and she tips her head, reaching with her free hand to alleviate an itch inside her ear with her pinky. In turn, she lets out a long breath.
Her companion's head turns to watch this operation. An answering twitch of mouth briefly lightens his expresion, nudging it past jaded cynicism. The bowstring of his spine unbends. "Up to you."
Ororo finally turns her gaze to meet his. She cocks an eyebrow. Her eyes reflect, mostly, exasperation.
Green splinters behind lashes, black trimming around the shadowed color to hide much of its expression. "You gonna say something?"
"I don't know, Chris." Ororo's nose crinkles just slightly, and then she turns her glance away again, a puff of breath escaping her lips in a voiceless fragment of a laugh. "You're not really saying much."
"What do you want me to say?"
Ororo snorts.
Chris retrieves his hand from Ororo's to prop his chin on his thumbs, palms pressed together to splice his mouth behind fingers. A prayer's pose, if unreligious. Eyelids lower further still, making a scimitar's slice of bright eyes. "I'm having surgery," he says. Immediate regret chases the bite of words: too late to retrieve them. "Fuck."
Ororo shifts on the stair, turning to look at him with a quiet regard. Her knees tip towards him rather than away, and her elbows rest on her thighs, hands cradling his keys as she retrieves her own. "Is it serious?"
Shoulders hunch again. "In and out. No." He exhales against the barrier of his hands, then glances sidelong. The even beat of breathing quickens, if by a token; behind the lashes, eyes have dilated dark and hungry. "Yes. No. The fuck do I know. Anyway."
Ororo hesitates over these words or those and speaks neither. She shifts closer to him on the step, sliding over concrete and rumpling the flowy pink of her skirt as she tucks herself against his side with the solidity of her slender frame lending warmth and weight to quiet words. "I could stand outside your operating room," she says. "Threaten to hit the surgeons with lightning if they screw up."
"That's motivation for you," Chris says lightly, smile lines creasing at the corners of mouth and eyes: a sham that does not quite reach the eyes themselves. "They'll do fine. It'll be quick, and then I'll just need some time to recover. A few weeks, tops. Mom's place. She insisted." The emotion that humps across his baritone is all sharp angles and prickles, awkward and baffled by its own presence. "Was sort of hoping to slide it under the radar."
Ororo breathes out, gaze lowering again just slightly. "Under the radar," she repeats, low and a little dry. Her hair shivers silvery with the slightest shake of her head.
Chris says simply, "Not just yours," and digs fingers into the hollows of his eyes, tracing the rings of fatigue that draw them haggard. "Jesus. It's not that big a deal. I hate hospitals. I hate surgery. I hate the fucking drama."
Ororo lifts her and draws her fingertips lightly over his back. "I did not say it was a big deal," she says, her voice mild as her touch is gentle. "No drama. No flowers or amusing balloons or get well cards covered in children's signatures."
Green flares, rimmed by white. "Christ," Chris says for variation's sake. The word is startled. "Children's sig-- hadn't even thought of that. I'll be fine. Don't worry about me. Use the apartment as much as you want. Mike or John might pop by from time to time to check up on things, but otherwise, it's all yours."
"Chris." Ororo says the name quietly, with a thread of exasperation thinning her voice.
Chris closes his mouth and looks baffled. What?
Ororo shakes her head at him and doesn't really answer. "Bear in mind that I'm not dating you so that I can use your apartment to hide from students."
The black head drops, baring the line of nape and scar tissue. Over the angle of his arm, one green eye grins askance at Ororo. "I wasn't giving you keys because you're dating me, Cadbury. It's not a girlfriend thing. It's a friend thing. Savvy?"
"I'm not friends with you so that I can use your apartment to hide from students, either!" Ororo gives him a little shove, her hand to his shoulder.
"Perk of the gig," Chris says, unfurling just enough to shove lightly back, a bump of shoulder to shoulder. "Fuck, Cadbury. If you don't have any use for it, I'll pass them on to -- I don't know. Cassidy, maybe. Except I'm worried what he'd do in my bed."
"Maybe I'll pine while you're gone," Ororo muses idly, her arm draped over his back as she leans into him. "Sit in your apartment and pine."
Chris slides an arm around Ororo in turn, face pressing into her crown. "Pine," he says, and shivers in tattered humor. "Like some bad romance novel."
"I wouldn't know," Ororo says with dignity, though laughter thrums in her voice.
"Romance novel, you end up with some prince in the end," Chris guesses without real conviction. His breath tickles her ear. "That's how it works in the Disney movies. Kids go for that kind of shit. --Hey. If you meet someone while I'm out."
Ororo closes her eyes. "I won't have sex in your bed."
Chris says, gravely, "Appreciate that. Not quite what I meant, though."
Ororo grins, but then tips her head to look at him instead. "What did you mean?"
"I'm a pretty crappy boyfriend."
"Are you?"
"You don't got much frame of reference," Chris remembers belatedly, and straightens to slide fingertips across her cheek. "You're supposed to be treated better than this."
Ororo looks at him thoughtfully, almost curiously, but does not deny him the point; or, for that matter, speak at all.
Chris's hand drops away, falling to the chilling concrete step to straight-arm his lean back. Overhead, something moves in the heavens, a suggestion of a flare that dies almost as quickly as it is born. The Perseids wrestle with New York City, and lose.
"You've ideas for how I should be treated, then?" The question is almost, but not quite, amused. Ororo can hunt for starlight later; whatever she hunts now is less celestial.
"Me. You should have ideas." The reply, lobbed back, comes with the slight turn of head that presents Ororo with a three-quarters view of him, washed by the dull gold of street light. Chris's mouth curls. "Julia'll give you some, if you want. I don't know. What do /you/ want?"
"You're the one with supposed to." Ororo breathes a soft snort and glances away again. "I don't feel like having the answers to that."
His free hand starfishes through his hair, raking it into hedgehog prickles. "Mmf," Chris says, and sinks back to mold his spine to the angles of the stairs. "Most women want -- I don't know. Commitment. Emotional availability. Fidelity. In that order."
"Do I offer so much of those to you?" Ororo almost, but not quite, laughs. "Well, that last one, I suppose."
"Do I ask that much?" Chris asks, pillowing his head with an arm.
"What do you ask?" Ororo turns this around, with the swift flicker of a smile. "What do you want?"
A lazy smile tugs at the corners of Chris's mouth. His eyes close. "I don't feel like having the answers to that."
"Uh-huh." Ororo makes a face, which he can't see with his eyes closed, but the grimace is likely guessable. "You're much better at having questions."
"It's my job."
At this, Ororo again falls silent.
Eyes open at the silence. The night is awash in faded shades of gold. Chris grimaces at it; an expression not too far distant from Ororo's, earlier. "Sorry. I don't know what I want. Not from you: from anyone."
"Harder to get it, then," Ororo says, barely more than a murmur as she tips her head slightly to one side.
Chris's mouth opens, then shuts again. Another grimace, this one tighter, skidded off chagrin. His turn to fall silent.
Ororo shakes her head slightly, and then shifts: slowly, she scoots away and unfolds from the step. The breeze that washes over them both is gentle and cool, and entirely her doing. "Do you want to go to bed?"
There is another dim streak in the sky. Chris pushes off the steps, telescoping slowly, painfully, a wince marking aches forgotten and rediscovered in the short period of repose. "It's late," he agrees, and looks down at her, his hands shoving into pockets, his face tired and distracted. "You staying?"
"That was the idea," Ororo says, lifting her chin slightly with a smile's breath ghosting through her tone.
Chris gravely thrusts out his elbow, inviting with an inner city gentleman's panache. Join me?
Ororo answers with a low laugh and the hook of her arm through his. Join him, she does.
The arm looped with hers is cool, but strong, and the stride that pushes them up the stairs has something in it of the old vigor. The door is propped open; he swings it open for her, doorman to a weather witch, and overhead, motes of stardust hurtle towards the earth in a rain of dying light.
There is a lesson there, for the unsubtle.
[Log ends]
Chris says good-bye to Ororo. Or at least -- till later?