Third Date
---
< NYC > McLaughlin Alley < NYC >
Compared to some of the more scenic alleyways and leafy enclaves of Greenwich Village and SoHo, this back alley doesn't particularly stand out to a tourist's roving eye or even that of an urban explorer. Quite the opposite, actually. Winding between mostly residential buildings with iron-wrought fire escapes looming overhead, it's cluttered with discarded bits of plywood and dumpsters that have spilled wet newspapers and rats to the path of dirt and broken cobblestones. Should one explore far enough down, they might find a few seedy, underpopulated bars, but none more impressive than the few shabby, hole-in-the-wall doorways that can be found as well.
[Exits : [T]he [S]anctuary, and [M]ain [S]treet ]
It is night.
It is cold.
Chris Rossi has, as he is informing the person on the other end of his cell phone conversation, the world's worst fucking job. "--Like a transvestite at a GOP convention," he adds bitterly, measuring the sidewalk before The Sanctuary with his pacing. The heavy overcoat flares, brushed into sullen wings by the draft of his passage; the dull, discreet spill of alley lighting powders the leather with gold. "The hell do I know. I got nothing. Lazzaro call in yet?"
At the darkened end of the alley, a thin line of light swings open into a blaze of muffled sound and illumination before it's obscured by a lone figure, and then cut off entirely. A scuff - boot rubber over moist asphalt. A cough that plumes irregularly and dissipates, as old lungs adjust to the cold air. Erik pulls his next breath in more carefully through his sinuses, fedora examined in the darkness before it's pushed over the silver of his hair...only to freeze with his right hand still holding it in place against a gust of wind that faded with Rossi's question seconds ago.
"Then the hell do I know," says Det. Rossi, a foot crackling over trash: cardboard; a plastic bag; a discarded can's flattened rib and its Eve, sporting a constipated red bull. "They're not talking to /me/. I can ask Irish, or--" Electric buzz bites nervously across the alley's echoes, carrying the man's Brooklyn-born baritone with it. Chris turns mid-stride, head lifting in canine attention to the door's aborted spurt of sound. Pale eyes squint at shadow. "Maybe the Poodle King."
Cold eyes unblinking, Erik moves only to lower his hand back to his side - silent, and not entirely sure how much of himself the detective can see, if he can see anything at all. The master of magnetism remains stiff and poised, as if caught in an invisible set of headlights.
Det. Rossi steers himself by that half-guessed silhouette, interest split between receiver and audience. "I guess," he tells the invisible speaker, his pace slowing to match the reluctance of his drawl. "But telepaths? Grey's right. They freak people...." Out. Out. Back turned to light and color, the man pauses with a cocked brow to puzzle out the face behind the shadow. "Hold on, Rick. I think I know this--"
A pair of trash cans. Cars, parked across the street, with time to spare on two of the three occupied meters there. Magneto's eyes slide cooly back onto Christopher.
"--guy," finishes the cop, blankly. A gun at his hip. A badge in his coat's inner pocket. Handcuffs tucked in his back. And, fizzing, glittering, spitting electronic glee in one hand, the cell phone. The green eyes sharpen, slivered between black. "/Fuck/," he begins. "Rick--"
No more. The phone dies a quick and merciful death, staticless. Painless. It simply ceases to function, shaken conveniently loose the mortal coil. And so there is silence. Within the alley, at least. In the background, there is traffic to contend with, as well as an airplane rumbling overhead. For a second (possibly two) before the expired meter SUV throws itself against the alley's maw - too large to manuever within its walls, though shrapnel and shattered glass explode into the vacuum. The impact is loud, and forceful enough to be felt through the concrete underfoot. And /finally/, Erik moves, a hand thrown up towards the Sanctuary door, holding it shut.
The phone's death is, in the grand scheme of things, trivial -- and yet the oath Det. Rossi awards it is a more momentous than the one that greets the hurtle of car: massive, grand, /grandiose/ punishment. The cop scrambles, losing the phone (it skitters away on a hopscotch of panic, fleeing with equal prudence) losing dignity in a headlong sprawl into the alley's corridor. "--!" he swears over the shriek and scream of torn SUV. Leather shreds, stabbed by glass and metal; blood stains dark skin, smearing the line of jaw and brow. "/Goddammit/. What the fuck did I do /this/ time?"
Magneto remains untouched by metal, but not by glass - nicks and cuts beginning to bleed here and there, despite the worst of it having hit the ground before reaching him. A protective blizzard of shrapnel gnashes and snarls violently in answer to Rossi's question. In slow motion, before Erik and behind Rossi, gravity overcomes the lodging power of momentum, and the ruined vehicle falls, rolling back down to earth with a pitiful groan. The sanctuary door jars, and his seething glare is drawn off Rossi long enough to dart to it before the shrapnel is dropped, and the man moved for.
A hiccuped step pushes Rossi to his feet again, hands ripping over a bed of concrete and glass. Trapped by dead-end and SUV, the detective scythes a sickle-bladed glance across the alley before baring his teeth, palms out and open: truce. Peace. Goddamn dumpster. "Nice to see you, too," he jags, baritone thinned and tight over adrenaline's breathless rush. The hands, scored across, tremble in their sign before routing elsewhere, swept aside. "You really want to kill a cop in front of /Sanctuary/?"
"You're following me." Erik accuses in answer, manic paranoia clearly evident in the icy pallor of his irises around contracted pupils. The door jars again, and again - only he's ignoring it now, advancing still upon Detective Rossi.
Green eyes glitter back, dilated to black; a step back meets trash and staggers, splaying Rossi's stance wide. "Follow you? Christ. I'd /arrest/ you if I stood half a chance. You think if I /could/ follow you, I wouldn't have the entire NYPD SWAT team here to back me up? Not to mention every poodle in the pack?" The deep baritone jigs across sped breath, catching through the puff and writhe of mist.
Magneto says nothing in reply to that, breath pushed furling and draconic out into the night air as Rossi's explanation goes in one ear and lingers there, tilting dangerously across a very deadly sword's edge.
Another step back, cautious -- glass crackles underfoot, grating into ice -- and Det. Rossi stills where he stands, arms spread, distanced from the battered home of body: away from pockets, from danger, from the urgent, yearning weight of the gun. The alley light zaps moody applause, flickering jaundiced color over the man's face and shoulder. White plumes eddies, and drags around the knit of jaw. Magneto's move.
"Who are you looking for?"
"A lead. On a case." Careful, that deliberate baritone, rough and low over the thread of cupric-tanged fear. "Nothing to do with you."
The next question is slower in coming. Low, and matter of fact, as Erik turns his head into the light, just enough for his eyes to glint pale and intelligent at Rossi, orange cancelling out blue. "A mutant?"
"Maybe." Rossi's glance flicks past Magneto at the door, that jarring, jangling door into -- ironic -- Sanctuary, beyond. Lids droop, veiling the skip and slap of emotion. "Vic was active in the mutant community. Figure some of her friends or the people who knew her might've seen something, been too afraid to come in."
Just beneath his left cheekbone, Erik feels for a moment - fingers pushing through a line of blood to settle upon a jagged bit of glass, which is then tugged loose and flicked irritably away to skitter over ice. A drop or two of blood pat after it with the force of a second flick. Near enough, police cars are on the move, sirens off. Someone's finally made the call.
Enough sparkles in Rossi's black hair (in his overcoat, in his blood-streaked skin) to make a diadem of the man, a scintillate outline in the absence of chalk. "We never just /talk/ anymore," he drags, baritone black under the lash-flayed gaze. "It's always slam, bang, assault and battery -- Nothing to do with you. Christ. Maybe nothing to do with mutants. Her kid was one. Could've been the ex, or the boyfriend. Still, got to find out."
"When you open your mouth to expell the vomitous, putrid mass of words and sentences that you attempt to pass off as 'conversation', I desperately want to kill you." Tired. Erik is just tired. A hand sweeps lazily at his side, palm facing the street, and the SUV rolls painfully over, and over again - into the street. A taxi hauling ass past swerves - honks. The SUV collapses back into its parking space. "I fear God may be working more swiftly in his effort to punish me than he is the successful advancement of those crafted in his image."
"Even God needs a hobby." Arms ease warily, lowered to a painful, angular drop by the tight coil of body -- injury there, sketched in the elbow's press against ribs and the cop's mask: skin stretched thin and taut over discomfort. Jaw, lips, throat, temples; shadow steals gold light and paints blue along the skull's hollows. And the brittle voice with its Brooklyn tincture. "What'd you do to the people inside?"
"I don't hate humans, you know." Erik replies, once again, offering an answer that has little or nothing to do with the question asked. "I don't /despise/ them. Not all of them. I believe, with a lesson in respect, in understanding, and less political power..." In his eyes, that look is building again. He does know, doesn't he? He understands? Surely, with - the first of the police cars rolls to a quiet stop. Cars have been passing every few seconds, and this is the first time Erik has recognized the slow tug of a car coming to a quiet and complete stop, headlights off. His eyes are back upon Rossi immediately, pulled from the street.
The other man's mouth -- the /human's/ mouth -- opens, cynicism, acerbic wit, intelligence, sweeping to the fray, only to snap shut over prudence. Weight shifts. Rossi's gaze follows Erik's to the street before turning back again, sharp. Shuttered. "Superpowers don't make the man," he says instead, edging another half-step back. "A corpse is still a corpse, whatever he's got for genes. Once his file's on my desk-- What do you want from me? I don't hate mutants."
A second car. A third. Helicopter blades churning ever nearer. Doors opening. Erik's eyes upon Rossi turn briefly exasperated, and then he's lifting. Flying, even. Up, one story. Two. Onto the roof, where he can start running, or take his chances with the helicopter cameras.
In a night of shock and surprise, one more barely warrants comment -- and yet. Rossi flinches back at that first, eerie hint of ascent, a step (another, another) stumbling him back to the wall's broad-lipped support. Light washes the alleyway, casting its debris into sterile, austere negatives; christens man and mutant too, bathing the one with a quick touch before turning its focus on the other. Spine pressed against brick, blood and glass stitching his coat, Chris sags down to meet heels with hips, seamed hands covering his face and the shudder of belated reaction.
".../Fuck/."
[Log ends]
Rossi runs into Magneto again, and is forcibly reminded that Lensherr is a nutjob.
< NYC > McLaughlin Alley < NYC >
Compared to some of the more scenic alleyways and leafy enclaves of Greenwich Village and SoHo, this back alley doesn't particularly stand out to a tourist's roving eye or even that of an urban explorer. Quite the opposite, actually. Winding between mostly residential buildings with iron-wrought fire escapes looming overhead, it's cluttered with discarded bits of plywood and dumpsters that have spilled wet newspapers and rats to the path of dirt and broken cobblestones. Should one explore far enough down, they might find a few seedy, underpopulated bars, but none more impressive than the few shabby, hole-in-the-wall doorways that can be found as well.
[Exits : [T]he [S]anctuary, and [M]ain [S]treet ]
It is night.
It is cold.
Chris Rossi has, as he is informing the person on the other end of his cell phone conversation, the world's worst fucking job. "--Like a transvestite at a GOP convention," he adds bitterly, measuring the sidewalk before The Sanctuary with his pacing. The heavy overcoat flares, brushed into sullen wings by the draft of his passage; the dull, discreet spill of alley lighting powders the leather with gold. "The hell do I know. I got nothing. Lazzaro call in yet?"
At the darkened end of the alley, a thin line of light swings open into a blaze of muffled sound and illumination before it's obscured by a lone figure, and then cut off entirely. A scuff - boot rubber over moist asphalt. A cough that plumes irregularly and dissipates, as old lungs adjust to the cold air. Erik pulls his next breath in more carefully through his sinuses, fedora examined in the darkness before it's pushed over the silver of his hair...only to freeze with his right hand still holding it in place against a gust of wind that faded with Rossi's question seconds ago.
"Then the hell do I know," says Det. Rossi, a foot crackling over trash: cardboard; a plastic bag; a discarded can's flattened rib and its Eve, sporting a constipated red bull. "They're not talking to /me/. I can ask Irish, or--" Electric buzz bites nervously across the alley's echoes, carrying the man's Brooklyn-born baritone with it. Chris turns mid-stride, head lifting in canine attention to the door's aborted spurt of sound. Pale eyes squint at shadow. "Maybe the Poodle King."
Cold eyes unblinking, Erik moves only to lower his hand back to his side - silent, and not entirely sure how much of himself the detective can see, if he can see anything at all. The master of magnetism remains stiff and poised, as if caught in an invisible set of headlights.
Det. Rossi steers himself by that half-guessed silhouette, interest split between receiver and audience. "I guess," he tells the invisible speaker, his pace slowing to match the reluctance of his drawl. "But telepaths? Grey's right. They freak people...." Out. Out. Back turned to light and color, the man pauses with a cocked brow to puzzle out the face behind the shadow. "Hold on, Rick. I think I know this--"
A pair of trash cans. Cars, parked across the street, with time to spare on two of the three occupied meters there. Magneto's eyes slide cooly back onto Christopher.
"--guy," finishes the cop, blankly. A gun at his hip. A badge in his coat's inner pocket. Handcuffs tucked in his back. And, fizzing, glittering, spitting electronic glee in one hand, the cell phone. The green eyes sharpen, slivered between black. "/Fuck/," he begins. "Rick--"
No more. The phone dies a quick and merciful death, staticless. Painless. It simply ceases to function, shaken conveniently loose the mortal coil. And so there is silence. Within the alley, at least. In the background, there is traffic to contend with, as well as an airplane rumbling overhead. For a second (possibly two) before the expired meter SUV throws itself against the alley's maw - too large to manuever within its walls, though shrapnel and shattered glass explode into the vacuum. The impact is loud, and forceful enough to be felt through the concrete underfoot. And /finally/, Erik moves, a hand thrown up towards the Sanctuary door, holding it shut.
The phone's death is, in the grand scheme of things, trivial -- and yet the oath Det. Rossi awards it is a more momentous than the one that greets the hurtle of car: massive, grand, /grandiose/ punishment. The cop scrambles, losing the phone (it skitters away on a hopscotch of panic, fleeing with equal prudence) losing dignity in a headlong sprawl into the alley's corridor. "--!" he swears over the shriek and scream of torn SUV. Leather shreds, stabbed by glass and metal; blood stains dark skin, smearing the line of jaw and brow. "/Goddammit/. What the fuck did I do /this/ time?"
Magneto remains untouched by metal, but not by glass - nicks and cuts beginning to bleed here and there, despite the worst of it having hit the ground before reaching him. A protective blizzard of shrapnel gnashes and snarls violently in answer to Rossi's question. In slow motion, before Erik and behind Rossi, gravity overcomes the lodging power of momentum, and the ruined vehicle falls, rolling back down to earth with a pitiful groan. The sanctuary door jars, and his seething glare is drawn off Rossi long enough to dart to it before the shrapnel is dropped, and the man moved for.
A hiccuped step pushes Rossi to his feet again, hands ripping over a bed of concrete and glass. Trapped by dead-end and SUV, the detective scythes a sickle-bladed glance across the alley before baring his teeth, palms out and open: truce. Peace. Goddamn dumpster. "Nice to see you, too," he jags, baritone thinned and tight over adrenaline's breathless rush. The hands, scored across, tremble in their sign before routing elsewhere, swept aside. "You really want to kill a cop in front of /Sanctuary/?"
"You're following me." Erik accuses in answer, manic paranoia clearly evident in the icy pallor of his irises around contracted pupils. The door jars again, and again - only he's ignoring it now, advancing still upon Detective Rossi.
Green eyes glitter back, dilated to black; a step back meets trash and staggers, splaying Rossi's stance wide. "Follow you? Christ. I'd /arrest/ you if I stood half a chance. You think if I /could/ follow you, I wouldn't have the entire NYPD SWAT team here to back me up? Not to mention every poodle in the pack?" The deep baritone jigs across sped breath, catching through the puff and writhe of mist.
Magneto says nothing in reply to that, breath pushed furling and draconic out into the night air as Rossi's explanation goes in one ear and lingers there, tilting dangerously across a very deadly sword's edge.
Another step back, cautious -- glass crackles underfoot, grating into ice -- and Det. Rossi stills where he stands, arms spread, distanced from the battered home of body: away from pockets, from danger, from the urgent, yearning weight of the gun. The alley light zaps moody applause, flickering jaundiced color over the man's face and shoulder. White plumes eddies, and drags around the knit of jaw. Magneto's move.
"Who are you looking for?"
"A lead. On a case." Careful, that deliberate baritone, rough and low over the thread of cupric-tanged fear. "Nothing to do with you."
The next question is slower in coming. Low, and matter of fact, as Erik turns his head into the light, just enough for his eyes to glint pale and intelligent at Rossi, orange cancelling out blue. "A mutant?"
"Maybe." Rossi's glance flicks past Magneto at the door, that jarring, jangling door into -- ironic -- Sanctuary, beyond. Lids droop, veiling the skip and slap of emotion. "Vic was active in the mutant community. Figure some of her friends or the people who knew her might've seen something, been too afraid to come in."
Just beneath his left cheekbone, Erik feels for a moment - fingers pushing through a line of blood to settle upon a jagged bit of glass, which is then tugged loose and flicked irritably away to skitter over ice. A drop or two of blood pat after it with the force of a second flick. Near enough, police cars are on the move, sirens off. Someone's finally made the call.
Enough sparkles in Rossi's black hair (in his overcoat, in his blood-streaked skin) to make a diadem of the man, a scintillate outline in the absence of chalk. "We never just /talk/ anymore," he drags, baritone black under the lash-flayed gaze. "It's always slam, bang, assault and battery -- Nothing to do with you. Christ. Maybe nothing to do with mutants. Her kid was one. Could've been the ex, or the boyfriend. Still, got to find out."
"When you open your mouth to expell the vomitous, putrid mass of words and sentences that you attempt to pass off as 'conversation', I desperately want to kill you." Tired. Erik is just tired. A hand sweeps lazily at his side, palm facing the street, and the SUV rolls painfully over, and over again - into the street. A taxi hauling ass past swerves - honks. The SUV collapses back into its parking space. "I fear God may be working more swiftly in his effort to punish me than he is the successful advancement of those crafted in his image."
"Even God needs a hobby." Arms ease warily, lowered to a painful, angular drop by the tight coil of body -- injury there, sketched in the elbow's press against ribs and the cop's mask: skin stretched thin and taut over discomfort. Jaw, lips, throat, temples; shadow steals gold light and paints blue along the skull's hollows. And the brittle voice with its Brooklyn tincture. "What'd you do to the people inside?"
"I don't hate humans, you know." Erik replies, once again, offering an answer that has little or nothing to do with the question asked. "I don't /despise/ them. Not all of them. I believe, with a lesson in respect, in understanding, and less political power..." In his eyes, that look is building again. He does know, doesn't he? He understands? Surely, with - the first of the police cars rolls to a quiet stop. Cars have been passing every few seconds, and this is the first time Erik has recognized the slow tug of a car coming to a quiet and complete stop, headlights off. His eyes are back upon Rossi immediately, pulled from the street.
The other man's mouth -- the /human's/ mouth -- opens, cynicism, acerbic wit, intelligence, sweeping to the fray, only to snap shut over prudence. Weight shifts. Rossi's gaze follows Erik's to the street before turning back again, sharp. Shuttered. "Superpowers don't make the man," he says instead, edging another half-step back. "A corpse is still a corpse, whatever he's got for genes. Once his file's on my desk-- What do you want from me? I don't hate mutants."
A second car. A third. Helicopter blades churning ever nearer. Doors opening. Erik's eyes upon Rossi turn briefly exasperated, and then he's lifting. Flying, even. Up, one story. Two. Onto the roof, where he can start running, or take his chances with the helicopter cameras.
In a night of shock and surprise, one more barely warrants comment -- and yet. Rossi flinches back at that first, eerie hint of ascent, a step (another, another) stumbling him back to the wall's broad-lipped support. Light washes the alleyway, casting its debris into sterile, austere negatives; christens man and mutant too, bathing the one with a quick touch before turning its focus on the other. Spine pressed against brick, blood and glass stitching his coat, Chris sags down to meet heels with hips, seamed hands covering his face and the shudder of belated reaction.
".../Fuck/."
[Log ends]
Rossi runs into Magneto again, and is forcibly reminded that Lensherr is a nutjob.