Drinking Buddy
---
Harry's Bar
An old tavern that stands from Revolutionary Times, Harry's is a common hide-away place for humans and mutants alike, although surprisingly quite a bit of the latter can be found, for all of the owner's devil-may-care attitude towards them. Modestly furnished in dark woods, it holds a relaxed, comfortable atmosphere that appeals to many, although almost never crowded. Up against one wall stretches the bar itself with several red leather barstools stationed in front of it and an impressive selection, behind the counter. Most of the rest of the room, however, is occupied by a few tables and booths, for people to dine at. Definitely not any kind of white-collar establishment, but the company it keeps is good.
"Really, Harry - don't be an ass." Erik mutters across the bar, silver hair distinct even in the somewhat shadowed area near the wall that he's opted to occupy. "I paid off well over half my tab the last time I was in here." This argument met with further grumbling, Erik rolls his eyes aside - right hand flicking back the edge of his overcoat so that the fresh leather of his wallet can be withdrawn and flipped open. A rather crisp one hundred dollar bill is thumbed out of a fold and onto the bar, only to vanish beneath the skeptical meat of Harry's hand as the wallet is replaced, and Erik looks signifigantly across the dark wood.
The door bangs open; the door bangs shut, and on a flood of biting cold and ice-touched wind, another patron stalks into Harry's bar. A quiet night, for a Saturday. Light spits across the black head and overcoat, tracing shivers of bloody color across the wrap of muffler. Heels drive into wood, percussive spikes of weary mood towards the bar and its span of empty stools. "You mind, Harry?" Tired baritone, familiar voice: Chris Rossi. He hooks himself over a seat, shoulders and spine bent towards a slouch.
"/Thank/ you." Ignorant of oncoming traffic, regardless of the rather unecessary amount of noise it's making, Erik winds long fingers around the iced glass of amber alcohol that's replaced his money and sighs quietly to himself. Get arrested again, and suddenly the world is that much less trusting that the bills will get paid.
The world is irrational. Unreasonable. Much like the fate that plants Rossi three stools away from Erik Lensherr, and feeds the cop the same brew as the terrorist. Wordlessly tactful, Harry plants a coaster by the detective's elbow, busies himself with the tap, then places the bloom of alcohol atop the cardboard square. Det. Rossi strips his hand free of its glove, and reaches for succor. Only. Only. Green eyes, skipped up, pause on the gleam of silver hair. Close, firmly. "No."
Having leaned comfortably aside into the wall, half-turned to face the rest of the bar, Erik sips cooly from the edge of his lifted glass - ice clinking at the mercy of gravity and its own bouyancy until it's set aside. Rossi is studied all the while, voice recognition having occurred shortly after his request. "Oh yes."
"No," the Brooklyn-sheathed baritone repeats flatly, and Rossi takes refuge in a long drink before replanting the glass, like a careful gardener. "No. You're not here. You're not who you look like, because /fuck/. If you are, you'll try to kill me in Harry's bar, and he'll kick you out. He'll kick /me/ out." Eyes peel open, recklessly bright, and stare blank grief at the mirror behind the bar. "I'll bet on him over you, any day."
"I won't be killing anyone today, Christopher. Least of all here." replies the cheerful terrorist, and not without the beginnings of an appreciative half-smile. Appreciative of what, God only knows. The irony, perhaps. Back turned to the conversation as he scrubs at a used glass, Harry snorts. Erik merely lifts his drink in a lazy and mocking salute, to bar tender and detective alike. "There are some things in this world that I do know better than to try. Age and experience, you see."
Det. Rossi -- Christopher -- sets his jaw, voice harsh. "If you're going to call me by my first name, call me Chris. If I can call you Erik. I got your guarantee on that? Word of honor? Do you /have/ a word of honor?" he asks of the bottles behind the counter. Lashes slap black daggers against the high cheek; the pulse beats time in the hollow warmth under the scarf. A pause. "Sorry. That was rude."
"Or what?" Erik Magnus Lensherr inquires, brows falling as his rather one-sided smile stretches into a leer, "You'll call the police? Really." Patronizing is the look that CHRISTOPHER is on the receiving end of. And not a little bit, either. "To answer your question, however, I do have a concept of honor, but it isn't an element I tend to apply lightly. In a case such as this, in other words."
"You're after the Friends," says Chris -- no, Christopher Lucius Rossi -- and turns a glittering, gleaming gaze onto Magneto. "So tell me. How's that going for you?"
Not particularly surprised by this particular turn of the conversation, Erik squares himself back to the bar proper, whiskey still balanced in the easy grip of his right hand. His expression has smoothed somewhat in the course of another sip, but for all intensive purposes, he remains amused. "Not terribly well, I'm afraid. The arrest, prison. Nearly dying again. I've been distracted."
"Heard about that." The baritone flexes into conversational timbres, smoothly belying the raw note underneath. A finger lifts in gesture to the bartender -- dinner? Fish and chips, thanks -- before wrapping itself around whiskey again, stripes of darkness between the sprawl of hand. "Jean said she did a number on you. I should tell her you're just peachy. That should make her day."
"Did you?" Now there's a flicker of genuine surprise and interest - cold blue eyes flicking aside to settle far more warily upon green and black. "Did she." Temporarily forgotten, Erik's whiskey hangs limply from the cage of his fingers, elbow propped up on the bar.
Says Rossi, saccharine, gentle as a raptor, "Spiffydoodle." Ice chimes, shifting in his glass. The black-clad shoulders hunch like wings around the brooding thrust of head; the detective stirs on his perch, jessed and hooded in private bitterness. "What kind of medical coverage do you have out in your fortress of doom, anyway? --No, wait. Let me guess. Mutant medics."
Magneto simply continues to stare narrow-eyed at Rossi until his thoughts can catch up, at which point he sets his drink back onto its coaster before he completely loses feeling in the ends of his fingers and drops it. "In two words, Ellen Dramsdadt. But - forgive me - 'that should make her day' - you were being sarcastic, of course."
Green eyes go blank, retreating to the file room of memory to rifle through history and inventory. "The prison break," Rossi recalls, taking up his own drink to touch it to lips. His foot hitches, hooking over the bottom rung of his stool, and the heavy wool of his overcoat drags down at the gesture, baring the sullen butt of gun at his hip. "If I were her -- no offense -- I wouldn't be crying over the idea that I might've offed you."
"Jean and I have something of a history." Erik mutters vaguely - shoulders dipping back as he shrugs his way out of the heavy black hang of his overcoat. The ribbed sweater beneath is just as black, and as practical - snug against the cold air and snow blowing about outside. The shoulder tabs are probably a little unecessary. "But yes, the prison break. Humanity finally discovers the fountain of youth of legend, and locks her away as a danger to society."
"She killed people," observes Rossi on the far side of a drink. Empty glass. He taps its base against the coaster to attract the barkeep's attention, and receives his reward in a bottle's splash and gurgle. "About as mentally sound as a pyromaniac in a straw factory. --Oh, wait. You have one of those, too. I forgot. That's some summer camp you're running over there. Eternal youth's overrated."
"You've killed a person." Erik smiles again, in much the same fashion as he did before, and eats some sort of nut or another from the bowl within his reach. "The trouble with blessings is that they are usually accompanied by curses. Ellen is the cure for cancer. AIDs, perhaps. Death." Another nut injested and crunched into oblivion, Erik lifts his drink again. "She's really rather talented in the bedroom as well." The summer camp jab is artfully ignored.
The hard jaw tightens again, a muscle leaping under the skin. "If you know that, then you know it was a good shoot," Rossi says, the Brooklyn tincture thickening across the retort. Pale eyes glance askance -- nut eating nuts, "Isn't that cannibalism?" -- and Chris reaches for his own peanut, adding with a certain mordant satisfaction, "Good to know the condom wasn't just being carried for ornamental value."
"I'm hardly condemning you, Christopher. I more than most understand that murder is occasionally necessary for the greater good. Not that knowing is ever really of a terrible amount of assistance." A short, dry, "Ha." granted the nut joke, Erik flicks his next victim aside, having apparently lost his taste for peanuts. No comment on the necessity of condom use with Ellen.
"It wasn't murder," Rossi says, the words ricocheting across ice and whiskey. Black brows lower, creasing lines of weariness -- frown lines, laugh lines, pain lines -- deeper against the natively dark skin. "He was trying to shoot my partner. You can't seriously compare what /you/ do with a skel drawing on a cop."
"Death is death." Erik replies, his smile tilting towards the more subtle end of the spectrum - hand tilting enough to allow him a swallow of whiskey. "You made the decision. You pulled the trigger. Your judgement ended a man's life, after measuring its worth and determining it to be something less than that of your partner's."
The detective taps his glass against the counter again, and once more the bartender returns with bottle and paid generosity. "I went through all this with the department shrink," Rossi informs, eyelids hooding the sliver of green: focused afresh on the bottles behind the bar. "You expecting me to feel bad? Yeah, I felt bad. I felt like shit. I got over it. How're you?"
"Alive." Dry once more, Erik eyes Rossi for a moment or two before lifting his glass and making a concentrated effort to catch the eye of the tender. "Murder isn't like depression. You can hardly expect a therapist to understand. Unless, of course, they are obligated to murder someone in the course of their training. Mmm. Another, if you don't mind, Harry."
"Therapists. Goddamn psychologists. Worse than lawyers. Only thing worse than a therapist is a telepath. --No offense to your fine mutant sensibilities," Rossi adds in a savage aside, forcibly settling the tight bind of shoulders into false ease. Ice sighs again, melting enough to bump with its fellows in competition for air.
"Ha. Telepaths. Thank you." The last is directed at Harry as his near-empty-save-for-ice glass is replaced by one that isn't brimming so much as it is less empty than its predacessor. "You really don't know the half of it. They are easily the most arrogant individuals on the planet - all of them, playing God at any given time. Usually for the sake of the rest of us, simple fools that we are."
"Self-righteous, self-satisfied--" It is an unthinking snarl, burred with the thorns of deep-seated, ingrained horror. Leaf-dark eyes darken further, shadowing across the residue of forgotten experience and unremembered lessons. "Poking around your brain just because they're fucking /curious/, and then assuming they know all about what's best for you, just because they've read the book...."
"Deciding what to tell you, and what to keep to themselves. About you. About the world in general. Because really, we are hardly equipped to make the right decision on our own, without their overwhelmingly kind and caring guidance, cross-bearing servants to society that they are." Erik sneers mildly to himself over the rim of his glass, then takes a sip, calming himself just short of relieving the downward tug around the corners of his mouth. "Always asking for permission, until the day comes when it suits them not to."
Something like a laugh splits across Rossi's baritone then, rough and uneven, second cousin to a sob. His head drops into a hand's cradle, fingers bladed to shield the closed eyes and to rub into the stark, strong profile. "You notice how much they resemble plain old ... /women/? God. /God/."
"My boy, I used to live with one." Considering that answer enough, Erik arches a brow at some memory or another, the cool curve of his glass pressed into the ridge of his cheekbone and then temple as he leans slightly forward. "Two, really."
"Women?" mocks Rossi, without real malice. He slouches there, leaning into his arm's brace and the support of the counter; the hand's curl props his chin, the thumb and its ball shaping to his jawline, the rest of the fingers muffling the roughened baritone timbre. "Close enough. --Yeah, I know. I read your file. Most common mutation, Jean says. That the world I got to look forward to? Telepaths on every street corner?"
"It's rarely as pronounced as anything you've experienced with Jean. I daresay many of them aren't even entirely aware of what they are, or what they are capable of." His voice having gone a little flat and distant, Erik is too comfortable where he is or too distracted to move much, even to drink. "I'm sure you will be dead before individuals like Ms. Grey are the theme, rather than the exception."
The detective widens his eyes, sardonic, black humor showing the whites around the irises before the narrow again to their habitual hooded state. "There's a comforting thought. You, though. You got -- what'd you call it, eternal youth? Enjoy it. Have a ball. There's your downside. Give me mortality, any day." Something tugs at the last, thickening the treacle of vowels and dull consonants.
"I have no intention or desire to live forever, Detective. It's really only a matter of time now, I'm sure. I've had numerous opportunities." Finally, Erik looks back to Rossi - sidelong, and darkly cynical. "The trouble is finding someone who will make certain that I die in the wake of whatever misery it is they opt to inflict upon me."
"Accusing Jean of being sloppy?" asks Rossi, with perverse cheer. He rouses, forearm dropping, and straightens with a touch of fingertips along the butt of his gun: a reminder, more prudent than threat. "Yeah, I'm with you there. If it gave me the Friends, I'd be happy to off you right here and now. I owe you one for that leather overcoat you trashed, anyway. I liked that coat."
"I lost something far more valuable than your idiot coat in the course of my arrest." Erik says back at a mutter, glass finally shifted away from his face so that he can down the rest of it in a single swallow. "I can't say I'm too upset with her, really." Back to Jean. "I would like to have accomplished something before I die."
Says Chris, simply, "I liked that coat. It made me look cool." Only a finger of whiskey remains in his glass, diluted by the spindling fragments of ice melting in the drink. He reaches past it to the bowl of peanuts, fracturing a shell between his thumb and the forefinger's knuckle. "Being front page news, getting thrown into prison twice, committing mass murder, trying to kill the president -- when you say 'accomplish something,' you thinking about carving your initials on the moon or something?"
Nostrils flare wide at that - jaw set, and posture losing some of its previous ease. Even Harry stiffens a little in his glass wiping, as Erik leans off the side of his stool and settles his weight onto his feet. The overcoat folded lazily over the bar next to him is pulled on, and through all of this, the ice of Erik's glare remains starkly upon Rossi. "Why don't you join me outside for a moment."
"He's either going to kiss me or kill me," Rossi informs Harry, remarkably sanguine. Hands shove into pockets and he slides off the stool, wariness -- and a certain wild, yearning anticipation -- fractured behind the slow hook of smile. "Neither thought dills my pickle. --After you, man. If you off me, my whiskey's going on your tab."
Harry is smart enough not to comment on the fact that Erik is still in the red when the older man strides past, and shoulders out the door, exchanging the warmth of the bar for its freezing exterior.
There is more life to Rossi's step leaving than there was entering, a spring to the long-legged stride that translates through the alertness of his gaze's swing, and the straight-armed shove that knocks the door's swing wide again for his exit. "Winter in New York," he says on a puff of breath, icy gravel shivering underfoot. "Why New York? Why not the Bahamas? Hawaii?"
Magneto is spry, for an old man. The instant the door has swung shut for the second time, he turns quickly back upon the younger man behind him and directs a right hook at what would be best described as the area in and around Rossi's face.
Whatever it is that Rossi anticipated, surely this was not it. Alcohol, recklessness, memory of more esoteric torments: all three combine to leave him unprepared. The older man's fist connects; Chris staggers back into the door, head jerked back at the blow. It slams shut at his body's concussion. Breath skirls white and thick over a curse, and retaliation is immediate, slung back on a broad fist. Young Master Rossi has /brothers/.
Crack. Erik is left somewhat hunched, and cradling a hand that is quite probably broken in at least one place, the glare he's still aiming at Rossi going on glaciatic as his breath furls angrily out into the cold. "/Mass murder/. Had you ANY idea of the MEANING of the term--" He realizes an instant too late that Rossi does not know better than to hit him back.
Instinct is as much saving grace as it is bane, for Rossi; having turned his body on an answering blow, it promptly backpedals to whisper urgent advice to unseated intelligence. The speeding fist jerks, pulling back just short of contact. Over it, behind it, green eyes clear into exasperated, infuriated reaction. "Jesus /CHRIST/," he explodes. "You /punched/ me!"
Erik exhales - eyes showing little more than their all-too-familiar color when they shift from Rossi's retreating fist to Rossi himself. "You're lucky I haven't bludgeoned you to death with a manhole cover."
"/Punched/ me. With your /fist/," Rossi repeats with great indignation -- and, alas, the first shafts of that dangerous, lamentable sense of humor, puncturing the initial bloom of anger. His arm drops to his side, heavy; his other hand, puzzled, finds his chin and massages it with baffled wonder. "Goddammit. Where's the SUV? Where's the street light? Where's the ... why the hell did you punch me?"
Right hand still grasped painfully by the left, if Erik has a logical reason for his action of choice, he has yet to share it. He is, however, clearly still quite furious, in the slight bare of his teeth, and in his breathing. "What would possess you to /say/..." The angled fall of his brows indicates that he's still incapable of understanding. "People today. /Schools/ today."
"I know, I know. It's a degenerate age. 'What's become of our youth? In /my/ day--' /You/ punched /me/," Chris reminds, shaping his spine to the door's lintel and leaning into it, slouched, legs straightened and thrust into turf to prop him up. "What the hell have I ever done to you? You've jacked me up twice, tried to kill my girlfrie-- Canto. Ruined my overcoat. --You've got a good arm on you," he tangents less heatedly. Almost cheerfully. "Your terrorist band have a baseball team?"
"Rrgh." says Magneto, disgust and annoyance in audible tandem. "I never attempted to kill Leah. Your own people saw to that." And in place of a light post, or an SUV, an empty newspaper dispenser is going to have to do - rooted bolts pried violently up out of the frozen concrete so that the human contraption can fling itself sidelong at Rossi, while Erik shifts his weight back onto his right foot and starts to turn away.
"She was trying to get away from the Friends--" begins Rossi, humor draining away to leave his face empty and harsh -- but the rip and groan of the dispenser breaks him off. A startled glance skips askance; then he is diving for safety, rolling into shrubbery with a blistering curse and rasp of gravel.
Magneto doesn't bother with accuracy. The dispenser is simply flung along a set course, and if Rossi opts to get out of the way, he isn't worth the effort of making adjustments accordingly. Erik is cold and irritable and sore, and walking away, now.
The dispenser shatters into the colloquial million pieces against Harry's door. The impact is thunderous; in its aftermath, the silence is deafening. Behind the shrub, Rossi rolls onto his back, shedding fragments of glass and metal to stare peacefully up at the lamp-washed sky. Light pollution. He contemplates it, dreamily. "--It was a good coat," he calls after Erik Lensherr, baritone rough with the memory of annoyance. "I looked /damned/ good in it."
Inside the bar, Harry sighs, and adds another number to Magneto's tab. He will never be paid. Never.
[Log ends]
Rossi goes drinking. With Magneto.
You heard me the first time.
Harry's Bar
An old tavern that stands from Revolutionary Times, Harry's is a common hide-away place for humans and mutants alike, although surprisingly quite a bit of the latter can be found, for all of the owner's devil-may-care attitude towards them. Modestly furnished in dark woods, it holds a relaxed, comfortable atmosphere that appeals to many, although almost never crowded. Up against one wall stretches the bar itself with several red leather barstools stationed in front of it and an impressive selection, behind the counter. Most of the rest of the room, however, is occupied by a few tables and booths, for people to dine at. Definitely not any kind of white-collar establishment, but the company it keeps is good.
"Really, Harry - don't be an ass." Erik mutters across the bar, silver hair distinct even in the somewhat shadowed area near the wall that he's opted to occupy. "I paid off well over half my tab the last time I was in here." This argument met with further grumbling, Erik rolls his eyes aside - right hand flicking back the edge of his overcoat so that the fresh leather of his wallet can be withdrawn and flipped open. A rather crisp one hundred dollar bill is thumbed out of a fold and onto the bar, only to vanish beneath the skeptical meat of Harry's hand as the wallet is replaced, and Erik looks signifigantly across the dark wood.
The door bangs open; the door bangs shut, and on a flood of biting cold and ice-touched wind, another patron stalks into Harry's bar. A quiet night, for a Saturday. Light spits across the black head and overcoat, tracing shivers of bloody color across the wrap of muffler. Heels drive into wood, percussive spikes of weary mood towards the bar and its span of empty stools. "You mind, Harry?" Tired baritone, familiar voice: Chris Rossi. He hooks himself over a seat, shoulders and spine bent towards a slouch.
"/Thank/ you." Ignorant of oncoming traffic, regardless of the rather unecessary amount of noise it's making, Erik winds long fingers around the iced glass of amber alcohol that's replaced his money and sighs quietly to himself. Get arrested again, and suddenly the world is that much less trusting that the bills will get paid.
The world is irrational. Unreasonable. Much like the fate that plants Rossi three stools away from Erik Lensherr, and feeds the cop the same brew as the terrorist. Wordlessly tactful, Harry plants a coaster by the detective's elbow, busies himself with the tap, then places the bloom of alcohol atop the cardboard square. Det. Rossi strips his hand free of its glove, and reaches for succor. Only. Only. Green eyes, skipped up, pause on the gleam of silver hair. Close, firmly. "No."
Having leaned comfortably aside into the wall, half-turned to face the rest of the bar, Erik sips cooly from the edge of his lifted glass - ice clinking at the mercy of gravity and its own bouyancy until it's set aside. Rossi is studied all the while, voice recognition having occurred shortly after his request. "Oh yes."
"No," the Brooklyn-sheathed baritone repeats flatly, and Rossi takes refuge in a long drink before replanting the glass, like a careful gardener. "No. You're not here. You're not who you look like, because /fuck/. If you are, you'll try to kill me in Harry's bar, and he'll kick you out. He'll kick /me/ out." Eyes peel open, recklessly bright, and stare blank grief at the mirror behind the bar. "I'll bet on him over you, any day."
"I won't be killing anyone today, Christopher. Least of all here." replies the cheerful terrorist, and not without the beginnings of an appreciative half-smile. Appreciative of what, God only knows. The irony, perhaps. Back turned to the conversation as he scrubs at a used glass, Harry snorts. Erik merely lifts his drink in a lazy and mocking salute, to bar tender and detective alike. "There are some things in this world that I do know better than to try. Age and experience, you see."
Det. Rossi -- Christopher -- sets his jaw, voice harsh. "If you're going to call me by my first name, call me Chris. If I can call you Erik. I got your guarantee on that? Word of honor? Do you /have/ a word of honor?" he asks of the bottles behind the counter. Lashes slap black daggers against the high cheek; the pulse beats time in the hollow warmth under the scarf. A pause. "Sorry. That was rude."
"Or what?" Erik Magnus Lensherr inquires, brows falling as his rather one-sided smile stretches into a leer, "You'll call the police? Really." Patronizing is the look that CHRISTOPHER is on the receiving end of. And not a little bit, either. "To answer your question, however, I do have a concept of honor, but it isn't an element I tend to apply lightly. In a case such as this, in other words."
"You're after the Friends," says Chris -- no, Christopher Lucius Rossi -- and turns a glittering, gleaming gaze onto Magneto. "So tell me. How's that going for you?"
Not particularly surprised by this particular turn of the conversation, Erik squares himself back to the bar proper, whiskey still balanced in the easy grip of his right hand. His expression has smoothed somewhat in the course of another sip, but for all intensive purposes, he remains amused. "Not terribly well, I'm afraid. The arrest, prison. Nearly dying again. I've been distracted."
"Heard about that." The baritone flexes into conversational timbres, smoothly belying the raw note underneath. A finger lifts in gesture to the bartender -- dinner? Fish and chips, thanks -- before wrapping itself around whiskey again, stripes of darkness between the sprawl of hand. "Jean said she did a number on you. I should tell her you're just peachy. That should make her day."
"Did you?" Now there's a flicker of genuine surprise and interest - cold blue eyes flicking aside to settle far more warily upon green and black. "Did she." Temporarily forgotten, Erik's whiskey hangs limply from the cage of his fingers, elbow propped up on the bar.
Says Rossi, saccharine, gentle as a raptor, "Spiffydoodle." Ice chimes, shifting in his glass. The black-clad shoulders hunch like wings around the brooding thrust of head; the detective stirs on his perch, jessed and hooded in private bitterness. "What kind of medical coverage do you have out in your fortress of doom, anyway? --No, wait. Let me guess. Mutant medics."
Magneto simply continues to stare narrow-eyed at Rossi until his thoughts can catch up, at which point he sets his drink back onto its coaster before he completely loses feeling in the ends of his fingers and drops it. "In two words, Ellen Dramsdadt. But - forgive me - 'that should make her day' - you were being sarcastic, of course."
Green eyes go blank, retreating to the file room of memory to rifle through history and inventory. "The prison break," Rossi recalls, taking up his own drink to touch it to lips. His foot hitches, hooking over the bottom rung of his stool, and the heavy wool of his overcoat drags down at the gesture, baring the sullen butt of gun at his hip. "If I were her -- no offense -- I wouldn't be crying over the idea that I might've offed you."
"Jean and I have something of a history." Erik mutters vaguely - shoulders dipping back as he shrugs his way out of the heavy black hang of his overcoat. The ribbed sweater beneath is just as black, and as practical - snug against the cold air and snow blowing about outside. The shoulder tabs are probably a little unecessary. "But yes, the prison break. Humanity finally discovers the fountain of youth of legend, and locks her away as a danger to society."
"She killed people," observes Rossi on the far side of a drink. Empty glass. He taps its base against the coaster to attract the barkeep's attention, and receives his reward in a bottle's splash and gurgle. "About as mentally sound as a pyromaniac in a straw factory. --Oh, wait. You have one of those, too. I forgot. That's some summer camp you're running over there. Eternal youth's overrated."
"You've killed a person." Erik smiles again, in much the same fashion as he did before, and eats some sort of nut or another from the bowl within his reach. "The trouble with blessings is that they are usually accompanied by curses. Ellen is the cure for cancer. AIDs, perhaps. Death." Another nut injested and crunched into oblivion, Erik lifts his drink again. "She's really rather talented in the bedroom as well." The summer camp jab is artfully ignored.
The hard jaw tightens again, a muscle leaping under the skin. "If you know that, then you know it was a good shoot," Rossi says, the Brooklyn tincture thickening across the retort. Pale eyes glance askance -- nut eating nuts, "Isn't that cannibalism?" -- and Chris reaches for his own peanut, adding with a certain mordant satisfaction, "Good to know the condom wasn't just being carried for ornamental value."
"I'm hardly condemning you, Christopher. I more than most understand that murder is occasionally necessary for the greater good. Not that knowing is ever really of a terrible amount of assistance." A short, dry, "Ha." granted the nut joke, Erik flicks his next victim aside, having apparently lost his taste for peanuts. No comment on the necessity of condom use with Ellen.
"It wasn't murder," Rossi says, the words ricocheting across ice and whiskey. Black brows lower, creasing lines of weariness -- frown lines, laugh lines, pain lines -- deeper against the natively dark skin. "He was trying to shoot my partner. You can't seriously compare what /you/ do with a skel drawing on a cop."
"Death is death." Erik replies, his smile tilting towards the more subtle end of the spectrum - hand tilting enough to allow him a swallow of whiskey. "You made the decision. You pulled the trigger. Your judgement ended a man's life, after measuring its worth and determining it to be something less than that of your partner's."
The detective taps his glass against the counter again, and once more the bartender returns with bottle and paid generosity. "I went through all this with the department shrink," Rossi informs, eyelids hooding the sliver of green: focused afresh on the bottles behind the bar. "You expecting me to feel bad? Yeah, I felt bad. I felt like shit. I got over it. How're you?"
"Alive." Dry once more, Erik eyes Rossi for a moment or two before lifting his glass and making a concentrated effort to catch the eye of the tender. "Murder isn't like depression. You can hardly expect a therapist to understand. Unless, of course, they are obligated to murder someone in the course of their training. Mmm. Another, if you don't mind, Harry."
"Therapists. Goddamn psychologists. Worse than lawyers. Only thing worse than a therapist is a telepath. --No offense to your fine mutant sensibilities," Rossi adds in a savage aside, forcibly settling the tight bind of shoulders into false ease. Ice sighs again, melting enough to bump with its fellows in competition for air.
"Ha. Telepaths. Thank you." The last is directed at Harry as his near-empty-save-for-ice glass is replaced by one that isn't brimming so much as it is less empty than its predacessor. "You really don't know the half of it. They are easily the most arrogant individuals on the planet - all of them, playing God at any given time. Usually for the sake of the rest of us, simple fools that we are."
"Self-righteous, self-satisfied--" It is an unthinking snarl, burred with the thorns of deep-seated, ingrained horror. Leaf-dark eyes darken further, shadowing across the residue of forgotten experience and unremembered lessons. "Poking around your brain just because they're fucking /curious/, and then assuming they know all about what's best for you, just because they've read the book...."
"Deciding what to tell you, and what to keep to themselves. About you. About the world in general. Because really, we are hardly equipped to make the right decision on our own, without their overwhelmingly kind and caring guidance, cross-bearing servants to society that they are." Erik sneers mildly to himself over the rim of his glass, then takes a sip, calming himself just short of relieving the downward tug around the corners of his mouth. "Always asking for permission, until the day comes when it suits them not to."
Something like a laugh splits across Rossi's baritone then, rough and uneven, second cousin to a sob. His head drops into a hand's cradle, fingers bladed to shield the closed eyes and to rub into the stark, strong profile. "You notice how much they resemble plain old ... /women/? God. /God/."
"My boy, I used to live with one." Considering that answer enough, Erik arches a brow at some memory or another, the cool curve of his glass pressed into the ridge of his cheekbone and then temple as he leans slightly forward. "Two, really."
"Women?" mocks Rossi, without real malice. He slouches there, leaning into his arm's brace and the support of the counter; the hand's curl props his chin, the thumb and its ball shaping to his jawline, the rest of the fingers muffling the roughened baritone timbre. "Close enough. --Yeah, I know. I read your file. Most common mutation, Jean says. That the world I got to look forward to? Telepaths on every street corner?"
"It's rarely as pronounced as anything you've experienced with Jean. I daresay many of them aren't even entirely aware of what they are, or what they are capable of." His voice having gone a little flat and distant, Erik is too comfortable where he is or too distracted to move much, even to drink. "I'm sure you will be dead before individuals like Ms. Grey are the theme, rather than the exception."
The detective widens his eyes, sardonic, black humor showing the whites around the irises before the narrow again to their habitual hooded state. "There's a comforting thought. You, though. You got -- what'd you call it, eternal youth? Enjoy it. Have a ball. There's your downside. Give me mortality, any day." Something tugs at the last, thickening the treacle of vowels and dull consonants.
"I have no intention or desire to live forever, Detective. It's really only a matter of time now, I'm sure. I've had numerous opportunities." Finally, Erik looks back to Rossi - sidelong, and darkly cynical. "The trouble is finding someone who will make certain that I die in the wake of whatever misery it is they opt to inflict upon me."
"Accusing Jean of being sloppy?" asks Rossi, with perverse cheer. He rouses, forearm dropping, and straightens with a touch of fingertips along the butt of his gun: a reminder, more prudent than threat. "Yeah, I'm with you there. If it gave me the Friends, I'd be happy to off you right here and now. I owe you one for that leather overcoat you trashed, anyway. I liked that coat."
"I lost something far more valuable than your idiot coat in the course of my arrest." Erik says back at a mutter, glass finally shifted away from his face so that he can down the rest of it in a single swallow. "I can't say I'm too upset with her, really." Back to Jean. "I would like to have accomplished something before I die."
Says Chris, simply, "I liked that coat. It made me look cool." Only a finger of whiskey remains in his glass, diluted by the spindling fragments of ice melting in the drink. He reaches past it to the bowl of peanuts, fracturing a shell between his thumb and the forefinger's knuckle. "Being front page news, getting thrown into prison twice, committing mass murder, trying to kill the president -- when you say 'accomplish something,' you thinking about carving your initials on the moon or something?"
Nostrils flare wide at that - jaw set, and posture losing some of its previous ease. Even Harry stiffens a little in his glass wiping, as Erik leans off the side of his stool and settles his weight onto his feet. The overcoat folded lazily over the bar next to him is pulled on, and through all of this, the ice of Erik's glare remains starkly upon Rossi. "Why don't you join me outside for a moment."
"He's either going to kiss me or kill me," Rossi informs Harry, remarkably sanguine. Hands shove into pockets and he slides off the stool, wariness -- and a certain wild, yearning anticipation -- fractured behind the slow hook of smile. "Neither thought dills my pickle. --After you, man. If you off me, my whiskey's going on your tab."
Harry is smart enough not to comment on the fact that Erik is still in the red when the older man strides past, and shoulders out the door, exchanging the warmth of the bar for its freezing exterior.
There is more life to Rossi's step leaving than there was entering, a spring to the long-legged stride that translates through the alertness of his gaze's swing, and the straight-armed shove that knocks the door's swing wide again for his exit. "Winter in New York," he says on a puff of breath, icy gravel shivering underfoot. "Why New York? Why not the Bahamas? Hawaii?"
Magneto is spry, for an old man. The instant the door has swung shut for the second time, he turns quickly back upon the younger man behind him and directs a right hook at what would be best described as the area in and around Rossi's face.
Whatever it is that Rossi anticipated, surely this was not it. Alcohol, recklessness, memory of more esoteric torments: all three combine to leave him unprepared. The older man's fist connects; Chris staggers back into the door, head jerked back at the blow. It slams shut at his body's concussion. Breath skirls white and thick over a curse, and retaliation is immediate, slung back on a broad fist. Young Master Rossi has /brothers/.
Crack. Erik is left somewhat hunched, and cradling a hand that is quite probably broken in at least one place, the glare he's still aiming at Rossi going on glaciatic as his breath furls angrily out into the cold. "/Mass murder/. Had you ANY idea of the MEANING of the term--" He realizes an instant too late that Rossi does not know better than to hit him back.
Instinct is as much saving grace as it is bane, for Rossi; having turned his body on an answering blow, it promptly backpedals to whisper urgent advice to unseated intelligence. The speeding fist jerks, pulling back just short of contact. Over it, behind it, green eyes clear into exasperated, infuriated reaction. "Jesus /CHRIST/," he explodes. "You /punched/ me!"
Erik exhales - eyes showing little more than their all-too-familiar color when they shift from Rossi's retreating fist to Rossi himself. "You're lucky I haven't bludgeoned you to death with a manhole cover."
"/Punched/ me. With your /fist/," Rossi repeats with great indignation -- and, alas, the first shafts of that dangerous, lamentable sense of humor, puncturing the initial bloom of anger. His arm drops to his side, heavy; his other hand, puzzled, finds his chin and massages it with baffled wonder. "Goddammit. Where's the SUV? Where's the street light? Where's the ... why the hell did you punch me?"
Right hand still grasped painfully by the left, if Erik has a logical reason for his action of choice, he has yet to share it. He is, however, clearly still quite furious, in the slight bare of his teeth, and in his breathing. "What would possess you to /say/..." The angled fall of his brows indicates that he's still incapable of understanding. "People today. /Schools/ today."
"I know, I know. It's a degenerate age. 'What's become of our youth? In /my/ day--' /You/ punched /me/," Chris reminds, shaping his spine to the door's lintel and leaning into it, slouched, legs straightened and thrust into turf to prop him up. "What the hell have I ever done to you? You've jacked me up twice, tried to kill my girlfrie-- Canto. Ruined my overcoat. --You've got a good arm on you," he tangents less heatedly. Almost cheerfully. "Your terrorist band have a baseball team?"
"Rrgh." says Magneto, disgust and annoyance in audible tandem. "I never attempted to kill Leah. Your own people saw to that." And in place of a light post, or an SUV, an empty newspaper dispenser is going to have to do - rooted bolts pried violently up out of the frozen concrete so that the human contraption can fling itself sidelong at Rossi, while Erik shifts his weight back onto his right foot and starts to turn away.
"She was trying to get away from the Friends--" begins Rossi, humor draining away to leave his face empty and harsh -- but the rip and groan of the dispenser breaks him off. A startled glance skips askance; then he is diving for safety, rolling into shrubbery with a blistering curse and rasp of gravel.
Magneto doesn't bother with accuracy. The dispenser is simply flung along a set course, and if Rossi opts to get out of the way, he isn't worth the effort of making adjustments accordingly. Erik is cold and irritable and sore, and walking away, now.
The dispenser shatters into the colloquial million pieces against Harry's door. The impact is thunderous; in its aftermath, the silence is deafening. Behind the shrub, Rossi rolls onto his back, shedding fragments of glass and metal to stare peacefully up at the lamp-washed sky. Light pollution. He contemplates it, dreamily. "--It was a good coat," he calls after Erik Lensherr, baritone rough with the memory of annoyance. "I looked /damned/ good in it."
Inside the bar, Harry sighs, and adds another number to Magneto's tab. He will never be paid. Never.
[Log ends]
Rossi goes drinking. With Magneto.
You heard me the first time.