9/14/06 - Natalie
---
Natalie nearly dials the number several times on her way home. Each time, the content of the call stills her finger and earns a scowl. Thus, the instant she steps free from the elevator and strides down the hall, keys jingling in one hand, she digs her cell phone out with the other and thumbs her way through saved numbers to dial Rossi's.
Peace and quiet in Rossi's house tonight -- because the man himself is not present. Lolled instead in Homicide, the detective exchanges insults with a drowsy-eyed partner, eyes tracking the loop of his baseball as it hurtles around the room. "--like a goddamn sheepdog," he snipes across the desks, planting his foot on a stack of files. The phone's ringing shifts his weight to a hip, barely enough to mine the small cell out of his pocket. "Not my problem. Seriously, man. Hairbrush. You understand the concept? --/Yo./ Rossi. Who's this?"
Natalie is taken aback, and for a long moment there is confused silence as she fumbles phone and keys.
"/Rossi/," the baritone drags again, exhaling through the Brooklyn accent. Chris rocks back in his seat, the rickety chair squawling with the weight. The phone separates from his ear; he stares at the caller ID, squints suspiciously, then reapplies it to his head. "Anyone there?"
"Oh. Oh! Uh... Chris?" Jingle go her keys. One clicks into place and she shoulders the door open before adding, "Sorry, this is Natalie."
Back Rossi goes again, the other foot crossing over the first to stretch him lean and long across the green-waxed seat. "Cousin Nat," he greets. The dark voice warms, matching the unseen slant of smile. "What's up? Recovered from the other night?"
"Are /you/ recovered from the other night?" Natalie shoots back, and removes the phone from her ear briefly as she slides her messenger back off and drops it to the floor in a heap.
"Family," Det. Rossi quips, eyes hooding under the blade of a hand. "I'm used to it. You build up an immunity after a while." Across the paired desks, John Beston drags himself up to his feet, a yawn smothered in the crook of an elbow. One spatulate hand bats a farewell on the older man's way out.
Natalie shakes her head, mute over the phone, and /flops/ backwards onto her couch. It steals her breath for a moment before she can reply, "No, /last/ night."
A starfished hand rumples through black hair, white silvering up through the splayed hand. "Last night," Rossi echoes blankly. His gaze tips up to the ceiling and its frayed, fractured cork tiles. "What the hell happened last night?"
"You were in a bar with Magneto!" Natalie accuses across the line.
"Oh," says Rossi. "Yeah. How'd you hear about that?"
"Uh." Natalie turns suddenly doubtful and squints up at her cieling. One arm shifts to drape over her eyes, blocking her view. "This guy. Who was there."
There's mockery in the quipped retort. "/Guy/." Rossi chuffs a snort over the line, though there is amusement in the sound, for all its exasperation. "He didn't kill anyone. It was a good evening, all things considered. Asshole told the entire club I was gay. Two guys hit on me before I made it out the door."
"Do you hang out with Magneto /often/?" Accusation lingers in Natalie's voice.
"Define /often/." Wait. "Hang out? Jesus. Like I get a choice."
There's a long pause on Natalie's end of the line, marked only by the sound of her breath, and she stares at the back of her arm.
"Didn't I tell you about this?"
Silence stretches another long moment before Natalie ask, tentatively, "Are you-- are you a mutant?"
Rossi grins into the phone, eyes slivered to brilliant green. The chair squeals under the turn of his body; the shading hand falls away from the brace of head. "What do I get if I say yes?"
"I'm /serious/!"
"Christ. Pushy broad." The detective rocks back again, then straightens with an abrupt jerk of body. Feet slam to the floor; files rattle, drawn across the desk. "Government tells me I'm not a mutant. They should know. They've taken enough of my blood to test me. At this rate, they'll be able to rebuild another one of me just from test tubes."
"Oh." If there's something mildly disappointed in Natalie's voice, it's surely unintentional. She pauses before she removes her arm and pushes herself to sit up. "So he just like... what? Visits you?"
The detective's shoulders hunch; his elbow pins on the desk, hand sliding again through his hair to prop the drop of head. "'Visits me,'" he echoes, a caustic note sliding through the rougher drawl of his voice. "You could call it that. Three times he puts me in the hospital. Has his flunkey /shoot/ me. Then he starts showing up in my apartment to steal my drugs and drink my whiskey."
"Put you... /three times/?" Natalie's voice thickens with horror, undercut by outrage as she straightens. "That's-- when?"
"When what?"
"Did he put you in the hospital?"
"Damned if I remember. It's been a bad year or so." There's a short pause. The baseball flies across the squad room; Rossi snags it out of the air and sends it flying back. "Purity," he adds as an afterthought. "The day of the Purity Rally was the first time."
Natalie's breath slides in sharply and her fingers clench around her phone. "You were there?"
There's a burr in the underside of Rossi's baritone, an edge to the jag of consonants. "Should've been. Ran into Pezhead in the Park right before, and he turned me into a pretzel. Never made it there. Go figure."
"I-- shit, Chris." Natalie finds herself without further words for some length of time, and she shifts uncomfortably on her couch, eventually sinking deeply back into the cushions.
"Related to cops now," Det. Rossi reminds, accent easing. A smile couches under the baritone. "Get used to it."
"Oh, not /even/," Natalie counters, straightening again with sudden vegeance. "I have always been related to cops. This is not /cops/. This is a cop who plays with /Magneto/."
"It's not like we share our legos, Nat. He has his toys, I have mine. We don't let them touch. I'm a better shot, but he can stop bullets. What'm I supposed to do?"
"I--" Again silence, as Natalie stares sullenly at her wall with deep helplessness. Finally she declares, "Tell him to stop coming!"
Rossi's mouth quirks up into a lopsided smile. He flips a file open on his desk to run a pencil down the page. "There's a thought. Never would've occurred to me to try /that/."
Natalie's lips curl to match Rossi's quirk, unseen. "Want me to write him a note? 'Leave him the hell alone'?"
"With a case of whiskey? Maybe a present?"
"Are you kidding me? I'm not buying Magneto a present!"
"Probably a good idea. Last guy who tried that got crucified."
Silence.
The cop hisses a sigh through his teeth, pushing away from the desk to lean into the seat's cradle. "Listen, Nat. Life sucks. I arrested Magneto once and put him away, and he got out. I got a plastic gun from the Feds. He nailed me with a metal frying pan and took the gun. Whatever his deal with me is, there's shit-all I can do about it. Every time nobody dies is a win. Capiche?"
"What? Oh-- oh." Natalie's quick to speak, words rushing in a tumble to cover her silence. "No, Chris, I mean, of course. He's /Magneto/. It's not like you can do anything."
"Exactly." Rossi snags a pen and scribbles a signature at the bottom of his file. "Plus," he adds as an afterthought, "the fucker owes me a coat."
"He said it was hell on your wardrobe," Natalie offers.
"SUV." The cop breaks off to yawn, digging fingertips into the hollows of closed eyes. "Bastard threw it at my head. Shredded my coat. And then there was the one I was wearing when his boy shot me."
Natalie pauses for another beat before she asks, "How many times? Three?"
"Three what?"
Natalie's fingers tap impatiently. "In the hospital."
"Yeah."
"You were in that article." Realization is sudden, abrupt, as recognition clicks into place.
Fingertips dig into eyehollows again, a knuckle scrubbing at the line of brow over the eyes. "Which one?"
"That one-- the Newsweek one." Natalie pauses, eyes widening in momentary horror as she recalls the article in full. "Oh."
"Oh." The deep voice flattens. "Fuck. That one. Yeah. Fucking Newsweek."
Natalie's voice drops deep and low, undercut with heartfelt sympathy. "I'm sorry."
The strangled sound that Rossi makes rattles in the back of his throat, a low-voiced growl that rubs across the rough of the line. He straightens in his chair again, rolling his head to stretch the line of throat and the ache of tightening shoulders. "Yeah, well. Shit happens. Forget about it. It was a crappy article. For the record, Lazzaro and me don't live together, and all that touchy-feely bullshit was because I threatened to toss the Newsweek guy in the dumpster."
A forced effort drags sympathy out of Natalie's voice, to be replaced by a light-hearted laugh. "Seriously? Are you allowed to do shit like that?"
"Police brutality," Rossi says without any evidence of regret. "My specialty. A guy's got to have a hobby."
"Couldn't learn to knit or something, huh?"
There's a small pause. "No," Chris says, eyes closing over a flicker of pain. Nostalgia. "Couldn't learn to knit or something."
Natalie hesitates, sensing a mistep but unable to quite place it. Tentatively, she tries again. "Juggling?"
Rossi grins into the phone, the expression tight. Once more the baseball ricochets around the squad room, lobbed by a fresh hand at the detective's head. He straightens just in time to snag it, fumbling the catch before flipping it backhand across the room at a new entrance. Shift change. The detective grimaces. "All I do all day, sweetheart. So now you know I'm alive and well and Magneto hasn't squashed my head like a grape. Okay?"
"Yeah. Ok! Good to know," Natalie answers, painfully chipper.
"Convincing." The baritone voice waxes dry. "You sound like a canary."
Natalie falls back against couch cushions with a sudden frown. "I what?"
"Chirping." There is noise in the background on Rossi's end; the entering shift greets the leaving one with ribald jokes and mockery.
"I don't chirp," Natalie protests instantly.
"Chirping," Rossi repeats more firmly. The cop stands, letting the chair spin empty behind him, and scrapes together files to make a lopsided pile by the computer. "Tweety Bird. --Shift's over. I'm heading out, Nat."
"Ok." There is a concentrated effort to keep her voice from chirping, and it comes out somewhat sullen. "Have a good night."
It would be too much to hope that Rossi would ignore this. "Now you're sulking. Or is that pouting? Jesus. Women." Humor lightens Rossi's voice, while the clatter of other conversations forces volume out of him to be heard. "I'll talk to you later, Cousin Nat."
"I'm not-- what the hell, Rossi! You are /impossible!/" Natalie finally claims in lengthy exasperation.
Chris grins into the phone. "Welcome to the family, coz," he says -- and the line cuts dead.
[Log ends]
Natalie hears a rumor about Rossi and Magneto's one true love and calls him in hysterics. Poor Natalie. Rossi doesn't date family. She is crushed. CRUSHED.
Natalie nearly dials the number several times on her way home. Each time, the content of the call stills her finger and earns a scowl. Thus, the instant she steps free from the elevator and strides down the hall, keys jingling in one hand, she digs her cell phone out with the other and thumbs her way through saved numbers to dial Rossi's.
Peace and quiet in Rossi's house tonight -- because the man himself is not present. Lolled instead in Homicide, the detective exchanges insults with a drowsy-eyed partner, eyes tracking the loop of his baseball as it hurtles around the room. "--like a goddamn sheepdog," he snipes across the desks, planting his foot on a stack of files. The phone's ringing shifts his weight to a hip, barely enough to mine the small cell out of his pocket. "Not my problem. Seriously, man. Hairbrush. You understand the concept? --/Yo./ Rossi. Who's this?"
Natalie is taken aback, and for a long moment there is confused silence as she fumbles phone and keys.
"/Rossi/," the baritone drags again, exhaling through the Brooklyn accent. Chris rocks back in his seat, the rickety chair squawling with the weight. The phone separates from his ear; he stares at the caller ID, squints suspiciously, then reapplies it to his head. "Anyone there?"
"Oh. Oh! Uh... Chris?" Jingle go her keys. One clicks into place and she shoulders the door open before adding, "Sorry, this is Natalie."
Back Rossi goes again, the other foot crossing over the first to stretch him lean and long across the green-waxed seat. "Cousin Nat," he greets. The dark voice warms, matching the unseen slant of smile. "What's up? Recovered from the other night?"
"Are /you/ recovered from the other night?" Natalie shoots back, and removes the phone from her ear briefly as she slides her messenger back off and drops it to the floor in a heap.
"Family," Det. Rossi quips, eyes hooding under the blade of a hand. "I'm used to it. You build up an immunity after a while." Across the paired desks, John Beston drags himself up to his feet, a yawn smothered in the crook of an elbow. One spatulate hand bats a farewell on the older man's way out.
Natalie shakes her head, mute over the phone, and /flops/ backwards onto her couch. It steals her breath for a moment before she can reply, "No, /last/ night."
A starfished hand rumples through black hair, white silvering up through the splayed hand. "Last night," Rossi echoes blankly. His gaze tips up to the ceiling and its frayed, fractured cork tiles. "What the hell happened last night?"
"You were in a bar with Magneto!" Natalie accuses across the line.
"Oh," says Rossi. "Yeah. How'd you hear about that?"
"Uh." Natalie turns suddenly doubtful and squints up at her cieling. One arm shifts to drape over her eyes, blocking her view. "This guy. Who was there."
There's mockery in the quipped retort. "/Guy/." Rossi chuffs a snort over the line, though there is amusement in the sound, for all its exasperation. "He didn't kill anyone. It was a good evening, all things considered. Asshole told the entire club I was gay. Two guys hit on me before I made it out the door."
"Do you hang out with Magneto /often/?" Accusation lingers in Natalie's voice.
"Define /often/." Wait. "Hang out? Jesus. Like I get a choice."
There's a long pause on Natalie's end of the line, marked only by the sound of her breath, and she stares at the back of her arm.
"Didn't I tell you about this?"
Silence stretches another long moment before Natalie ask, tentatively, "Are you-- are you a mutant?"
Rossi grins into the phone, eyes slivered to brilliant green. The chair squeals under the turn of his body; the shading hand falls away from the brace of head. "What do I get if I say yes?"
"I'm /serious/!"
"Christ. Pushy broad." The detective rocks back again, then straightens with an abrupt jerk of body. Feet slam to the floor; files rattle, drawn across the desk. "Government tells me I'm not a mutant. They should know. They've taken enough of my blood to test me. At this rate, they'll be able to rebuild another one of me just from test tubes."
"Oh." If there's something mildly disappointed in Natalie's voice, it's surely unintentional. She pauses before she removes her arm and pushes herself to sit up. "So he just like... what? Visits you?"
The detective's shoulders hunch; his elbow pins on the desk, hand sliding again through his hair to prop the drop of head. "'Visits me,'" he echoes, a caustic note sliding through the rougher drawl of his voice. "You could call it that. Three times he puts me in the hospital. Has his flunkey /shoot/ me. Then he starts showing up in my apartment to steal my drugs and drink my whiskey."
"Put you... /three times/?" Natalie's voice thickens with horror, undercut by outrage as she straightens. "That's-- when?"
"When what?"
"Did he put you in the hospital?"
"Damned if I remember. It's been a bad year or so." There's a short pause. The baseball flies across the squad room; Rossi snags it out of the air and sends it flying back. "Purity," he adds as an afterthought. "The day of the Purity Rally was the first time."
Natalie's breath slides in sharply and her fingers clench around her phone. "You were there?"
There's a burr in the underside of Rossi's baritone, an edge to the jag of consonants. "Should've been. Ran into Pezhead in the Park right before, and he turned me into a pretzel. Never made it there. Go figure."
"I-- shit, Chris." Natalie finds herself without further words for some length of time, and she shifts uncomfortably on her couch, eventually sinking deeply back into the cushions.
"Related to cops now," Det. Rossi reminds, accent easing. A smile couches under the baritone. "Get used to it."
"Oh, not /even/," Natalie counters, straightening again with sudden vegeance. "I have always been related to cops. This is not /cops/. This is a cop who plays with /Magneto/."
"It's not like we share our legos, Nat. He has his toys, I have mine. We don't let them touch. I'm a better shot, but he can stop bullets. What'm I supposed to do?"
"I--" Again silence, as Natalie stares sullenly at her wall with deep helplessness. Finally she declares, "Tell him to stop coming!"
Rossi's mouth quirks up into a lopsided smile. He flips a file open on his desk to run a pencil down the page. "There's a thought. Never would've occurred to me to try /that/."
Natalie's lips curl to match Rossi's quirk, unseen. "Want me to write him a note? 'Leave him the hell alone'?"
"With a case of whiskey? Maybe a present?"
"Are you kidding me? I'm not buying Magneto a present!"
"Probably a good idea. Last guy who tried that got crucified."
Silence.
The cop hisses a sigh through his teeth, pushing away from the desk to lean into the seat's cradle. "Listen, Nat. Life sucks. I arrested Magneto once and put him away, and he got out. I got a plastic gun from the Feds. He nailed me with a metal frying pan and took the gun. Whatever his deal with me is, there's shit-all I can do about it. Every time nobody dies is a win. Capiche?"
"What? Oh-- oh." Natalie's quick to speak, words rushing in a tumble to cover her silence. "No, Chris, I mean, of course. He's /Magneto/. It's not like you can do anything."
"Exactly." Rossi snags a pen and scribbles a signature at the bottom of his file. "Plus," he adds as an afterthought, "the fucker owes me a coat."
"He said it was hell on your wardrobe," Natalie offers.
"SUV." The cop breaks off to yawn, digging fingertips into the hollows of closed eyes. "Bastard threw it at my head. Shredded my coat. And then there was the one I was wearing when his boy shot me."
Natalie pauses for another beat before she asks, "How many times? Three?"
"Three what?"
Natalie's fingers tap impatiently. "In the hospital."
"Yeah."
"You were in that article." Realization is sudden, abrupt, as recognition clicks into place.
Fingertips dig into eyehollows again, a knuckle scrubbing at the line of brow over the eyes. "Which one?"
"That one-- the Newsweek one." Natalie pauses, eyes widening in momentary horror as she recalls the article in full. "Oh."
"Oh." The deep voice flattens. "Fuck. That one. Yeah. Fucking Newsweek."
Natalie's voice drops deep and low, undercut with heartfelt sympathy. "I'm sorry."
The strangled sound that Rossi makes rattles in the back of his throat, a low-voiced growl that rubs across the rough of the line. He straightens in his chair again, rolling his head to stretch the line of throat and the ache of tightening shoulders. "Yeah, well. Shit happens. Forget about it. It was a crappy article. For the record, Lazzaro and me don't live together, and all that touchy-feely bullshit was because I threatened to toss the Newsweek guy in the dumpster."
A forced effort drags sympathy out of Natalie's voice, to be replaced by a light-hearted laugh. "Seriously? Are you allowed to do shit like that?"
"Police brutality," Rossi says without any evidence of regret. "My specialty. A guy's got to have a hobby."
"Couldn't learn to knit or something, huh?"
There's a small pause. "No," Chris says, eyes closing over a flicker of pain. Nostalgia. "Couldn't learn to knit or something."
Natalie hesitates, sensing a mistep but unable to quite place it. Tentatively, she tries again. "Juggling?"
Rossi grins into the phone, the expression tight. Once more the baseball ricochets around the squad room, lobbed by a fresh hand at the detective's head. He straightens just in time to snag it, fumbling the catch before flipping it backhand across the room at a new entrance. Shift change. The detective grimaces. "All I do all day, sweetheart. So now you know I'm alive and well and Magneto hasn't squashed my head like a grape. Okay?"
"Yeah. Ok! Good to know," Natalie answers, painfully chipper.
"Convincing." The baritone voice waxes dry. "You sound like a canary."
Natalie falls back against couch cushions with a sudden frown. "I what?"
"Chirping." There is noise in the background on Rossi's end; the entering shift greets the leaving one with ribald jokes and mockery.
"I don't chirp," Natalie protests instantly.
"Chirping," Rossi repeats more firmly. The cop stands, letting the chair spin empty behind him, and scrapes together files to make a lopsided pile by the computer. "Tweety Bird. --Shift's over. I'm heading out, Nat."
"Ok." There is a concentrated effort to keep her voice from chirping, and it comes out somewhat sullen. "Have a good night."
It would be too much to hope that Rossi would ignore this. "Now you're sulking. Or is that pouting? Jesus. Women." Humor lightens Rossi's voice, while the clatter of other conversations forces volume out of him to be heard. "I'll talk to you later, Cousin Nat."
"I'm not-- what the hell, Rossi! You are /impossible!/" Natalie finally claims in lengthy exasperation.
Chris grins into the phone. "Welcome to the family, coz," he says -- and the line cuts dead.
[Log ends]
Natalie hears a rumor about Rossi and Magneto's one true love and calls him in hysterics. Poor Natalie. Rossi doesn't date family. She is crushed. CRUSHED.