(no subject)
20 January 2007:
The restaurant, with its light cafe atmosphere, is not so busy now at dinnertime as it apparently is at lunch, judging by the well-kept and prosperous air of the place, but for someone looking for a good compromise between 'coffee' and 'dinner' in the matter of meetings, it's an ideal compromise. No candles, no romatically lowered lights, just good food. Zenith, relaxed in her chair at the table for two, is dressed similarly--the dressy layered waves of material of her dark green skirt around her knees is paired with the simplicity of a pale peach top, patterned with faux old-timey flower patterns labeled in French or something similarly unreadable. The neckline isn't even showing cleavage--yet.
For all his increasing experience with crutches and public transportation, Andre is still a couple of minutes later than the time they agreed upon over the phone. Not late enough to be considered unfashionable if this were a group meeting, but still enough that the expression crossing his cold-reddened features when he is directed to the proper table is more sheepish than salutatory. He's wearing dark pants and a deep red turtleneck sweater with a zipper in the collar. It's slightly unzipped, showing the worn-out edge of a t-shirt collar underneath. "Hey, sorry!" he says as he maneuvers himself into a seat, propping his crutches up against the edge of the table.
Zenith waves that away, setting down the water she had been sipping at to smile over at him. "It's hardly your fault." She inclines her head towards the crutches. "How're you doing?" Her tone softens the question into something more sincere than the usual conversational ritual.
Andre appears as if he's going to answer the question, but that little tickly feeling in the back of his sinuses decides to answer first. He's able to liberate his napkin from the silverware it protects in time to block the sneeze from being too loud or disgusting, but there is a sneeze nevertheless. He then holds up one index finger in an indication to wait as he takes a sip of the glass of water already waiting for him. "Better than I was when you called," he clarifies at last. "Sneezing means there's airflow in there, which is more than I could say for last week. What about you?"
"I thought your voice sounded a little--" Zenith gestures vaguely to her own sinuses. She looks more than a little disappointed, and she drops her chin into a palm she brings up, propping her elbow on the table, to look at him a little sideways. "So you still feeling pretty sick, then?"
Andre has stashed the napkin in his lap, ready to be drawn quickly in case of another impending sneeze. He lifts both hands, palms facing out, toward Zenith. "I'm not going to get close enough to infect anyone, I promise. If it's even still contagious." One hand descends to rest on the table, and the other lifts the water again. "Not so much anymore. Just tired more than anything else. But seriously, when you called, that was already /progress/." The slight choking noise he makes is a manner of commentary, not an actual choke.
Zenith reaches out to touch Andre's hand, a light brush of her thumb over the back of it before she settles it back on her side of the table again. "Not close enough to infect anyone makes for a very boring evening," she says, straightforward, straight-faced, but eyes dancing. "Aren't you most contagious, like, just when you first have it?"
Andre's brows raise slightly and he pulls his head back, chin nearing his collarbone. The fingers of the hand that Zenith has touched tapping lightly against the table. "I'm really not sure. That's what they say, I guess, but this thing's miserable enough that I don't want to take chances of inflicting it on anyone." The caution in his tone is genuine. "At least I was on leave for work this concert cycle anyway. Eesh." He sips the water. "How go the plans for your show?"
Zenith settles back, and flips through her menu absently. After a moment, she sighs, and then suddenly brightens as a thought occurs. "I think I would have gotten that already, though, if it's what's been going around--a couple people I've talked to have had it, and still no signs for me. I should be safe." She presents the last sentence hopefully, tapping her own fingers in a idle pattern on the table to bring her hand into touching distance. "Anyway. I talked to your manager chick, and she wouldn't commit, but it's at least hopeful. But I guess you probably already knew that."
"Really? Then I guess you've got resistance in the genes or something. Lucky..." Andre shakes his head, pushing air out slightly parted lips. When dealing with percussionists, tapping is contagious, and what was a sporadic flicker of Andre's hand turns into a more consistent cadence. It manifests in practically in motion alone, though; the faint trace of sound is muted. "She wouldn't?" He frowns slightly. "That's pretty weird of her. As far as I could tell on my timing, she's good about auditions. But maybe it's because it's midseason and you're a soloist, in a way."
Playfully, Zenith tries to mirror the rhythm, frowning as she tries and fails to capture the finer points. She turns the game into stalking his fingers with her own instead. "Well, I probably sounded scattered, and unprofessional." Zenith uses her other hand to rub the side of her face. "There's /so/ many details, and I haven't been able to find people with the experience to take care of them yet. Not that I don't have the money, but I'm just not sure where to look." She shrugs one shoulder. "Soloist, yeah. My partner's kind of a jerk. He said fuck no to letting me try to float him too."
Andre snorts in amusement. Not in sinus pain. "Scattered and unprofessional? Man, you seriously haven't spent much time around professional musicians. You'd find the term to be an /utter/ oxymoron, especially with some of the woodwinds." The rhythm of his fingers persists, unmarked and changing, more Rite of Spring than Bolero. "I guess /I/ could ask her about the stuff we did with the ballet. Maybe their agent's the better one to go by..." At the declaration of no floating, he frowns exaggeratedly. "Huh, really? I thought the point of dancing was to look weightless! Why not go the whole way?"
"I /like/ you," Zenith says, light and laughing but no less sincere. She attempts to slip her hand under his so he's tapping against her palm rather than the table. "Anything you could do to help it along, I'd be very grateful." She looks down for a moment, shaking her head. "I dunno. I guess maybe it's different if you're not in control of it? I have no idea what that feels like, obviously. I thought we had the trust, but maybe not enough for that." She looks up suddenly, expression a little more serious. "I did it to you when we first met. It wasn't so freaky, was it?"
The slipping maneuver works. It takes Andre's fingers a few moments to register that the surface beneath them is no longer table, and the tapping persists until that point, at which it halts abruptly. He looks down at the hands, then uses his other to again partake of his water. "I wasn't freaked. I mean, surprised, sure, but not freaked. Freaked was getting the leg broken to begin with. Not having it relieved of its weightbearing duties after the fact."
"Happy to do it again, if you need it," Zenith offered. "Walk you home if you want." She grins--meaningfully. She flexes her hand, inviting him to continue his rhythm. "Injuries? Definitely freaky." She exhales in amusement at the obviousness of the comment. She's interrupted by the advent of a waiter, but she orders the soup of the day and salad without recourse to her abandoned menu.
"Walk me home?" Andre repeats, the end of the sentence going to a higher note than most questions entail, brows lifting exaggeratedly. "We haven't even ordered and you're already trying to get rid of me?" He's practically whining, but in a way that could only be interpreted as serious if one had never heard a serious complaint before. The sound degenerates into a soft laugh. His hand reflexively twitches at the poking. Andre requests pasta of the waiter, then continues more seriously, "Don't plan on having that kind of freaky again."
"We haven't even--we've just ordered--and I'm already trying to figure out what I have to look forward to," Zenith says, lips quirked, slipping a bra-strap back into place that may or may not have been out of place. "You taking self-defense classes or something?" she asks.
Andre laughs out loud at the question, shaking his head, both hands lifting to point parallel index fingers at the crutches resting against the table's edge. "You're kidding me, right? I can't even stand well enough to do the wax-on-wax-off bit right now, let alone the crane maneuver!" It is possible that someone has been watching classic movies while sick. "I had a little bit of judo before it happened. It was...less than effective in this case."
Zenith wrinkles her nose at her phrasing, and waves a hand. "I meant planning to. When you're healed up. Yeah, not right now. That would be impressive." She grins at him. "Well, the time I got mugged, I thought my powers would be a good defense, but they turned out a little...too effective." She looks aside, lost in her own thoughts and memories.
Andre's hands now fall to the edge of the table, one on either side of his place setting, fingers picking up a slower and steadier cadence than before, though just as noiseless. "I probably should, though I do want to wait before it's good and healed. Don't want to dislodge all the hardware they stuck in there." He frowns at that concept, but the expression on the whole lifts to one of morbid curiosity at the second part of Zenith's remarks. "Oh man...What did you /do/?"
"Well--" For once in the evening, Zenith looks insecure, rather than focused on her goal. "As long as you promise not to be scared off. Or let my tits outweigh the impulse, anyway." She laughs, a little nervous, a lot awkward. "I threw the guy back. Threw everything back--" Her hands cup around a central point, and then she pulls them outwards, illustrating the expanding circle. "Including a bystander through a window. Mugger booked, and I got arrested for 'attacking' the other guy." She lets out a long breath. "So now you know my dark secret. What's yours?"
Andre's eyes open wider, and indeed may be the most focused directly on Zenith's face that they have been all evening thus far. "Oh maaan..." he reiterates, the sound of the last word diffusing into a soft laugh, amused and impressed. Perhaps even a little nervous. The open laugh turns into a sound produced at the back of his sinuses, then silences into a shake of his head. He lifts his hands and knits the fingers together, propping his elbows on the table and his chin on his fingers. "Jeez, you could've tried to slam the bystander guy for obstruction of justice if his story's what landed you in jail!" His head tilts slightly on the fulcrum of his hands. "Mine is just...not /that/ good of a story!"
"Oh, no. He was in a coma," Zenith says, a little bitterly. She searches his expression, apparently trying to read his reaction. She doesn't come away with enough to make her tense further, but not enough to make her relax, either. "Oh, please. Tell. It's only fair."
Andre's upper lip wrinkles upward, showing a hint of teeth and a lot of disapproval. "He was in a coma," Andre repeats. "So he could not testify against you, and they still couldn't handle self defense as legit on your part?" He coughs, rattly with residual congestion. "I guess that's really not as surprising as I'd like it to be, though. I had this museum gig once, and this cop caught me leaving and assumed I had no reason to be there and also automatically figured I was a mutant because of it."
Zenith sets her shoulders, trying to settle out the tension of recounting it. "Helpful witness. Saw the bystander come through the window, not the mugger--'Oh, yes, officer, the nasty mutant just up and attacked the guy.'" She makes an effort to smile. "But hey, I'm not in jail. The justice system seems to have worked." She tilts her head. "A mutant? One that teleported inside, or what?" She manages a laugh.
Andre is not smiling at the description of events. He bites his lower lip and looks down at Zenith's hands for a few seconds. When he looks back up, the jolt of his general motion, from the wider opening of eyes to the release of his clasped fingers, is as if he's coming out of some sudden deep thought. "Good that you're not! And I have /no/ idea what this cop thought, other than mutant in general. Not a clue. But I'll tell you, if I could do something so useful as teleporting, do you think I would have stuck around to get my leg snapped?"
Zenith's smile winks into life at Andre's endorsement of the fact she's not in jail, and she exhales in amusement. "I would certainly think not." She shakes her head. "Because anyone robbing a museum would obviously be a mutant, too." She snorts. "Anyway, this is kind of a depressing topic. If we start talking about the political situation for mutants--" Fortunately, this is interrupted by the arrival of her salad, and topic changes are put aside for taking a few bites.
The pasta that Andre ordered does not come with salad, but there is a basket of bread deposited on the table between him and Zenith, and he takes a slice of a darker loaf with whole seeds on the crust, proceeding to butter it lightly. His concentration on this task seems rather exaggerated -- tight mouth, intensely-focused eyes, set jaw. When the bread has had its covering, though, he does not yet bite it. It is held between two fingers, and the same two fingers on the opposite hand wave in a casual manner that is almost contradictory to his expression. "I mean, she was technically right, but it was totally not relevant to the situation."
Zenith pauses, a forkful of lettuce halfway to her mouth, to look up. Then she finishes the bite, and sets the fork down before turning her attention to belatedly spreading her napkin over her lap, and smoothing out the wrinkles. "Oh?" she says, lightly.
"Not about the robbing the bank part," Andre clarifies, choosing that moment for a strategic bite of bread. He chews slowly. His eyes remain wide and alert.
"Well, you know I'm one. I'm hardly going to freak out at you for it," Zenith says leadingly, jumping a few steps in the conversation.
Andre finishes chewing, then places the slice of bread on the appetizer plate, then lifts the napkin, then dabs his mouth, then sets it down, then drinks some water, then swallows. It is not a slow process in terms of time, but the silence associated with it makes it feel like a run-on sentence with the sound off. And yet, with that buildup, the end statement is simple. "I stop earthquakes." Shrug.
Zenith finally looks at him, but more out of curiosity and interest than surprise. "Ones that you're in? Or anywhere?" She chances a smile. "That could be useful. You should move to California."
"Ones that I'm in," Andre explains, lifting the bread again. It just hovers in his hand somewhere in the vicinity of his mouth, though, as he gives a brief snort to Zenith's suggestion, lips twisting into a smirk. "I grew up in California. That's how I found out I could do this."
Zenith finally goes for bread of her own, leaving about half of her salad in the plate-scattered state that suggests she's not planning to come back to it. She smiles a little wanly as she considers her own suggestion again. "No complex about saving the world, then? Probably more sensible." Her lips quirk as a thought occurs. "That must have been...interesting, the first time."
There is a distance in Andre's eyes when he regards Zenith now. He faces her, that's certain, and his eyes seem to be looking nearly in hers, but there's some lack of focus in the brown irises. "It was...really strange, yeah. Loma Prieta. 1989. I just got really tired all of a sudden and went to lie down, and then there were news things and phone calls and sirens and there was smoke visible over the bay and people were talking about quakes, but I felt nothing. It postponed the World Series, I felt nothing. Didn't know why at the time." He runs a finger along the rim of his water glass and lowers his voice. "I have to admit, when I hear there was a big one that killed people, I feel guilty I wasn't there to help. Even though I know it's not practical."
Zenith nods. "Yeah," she agrees generally to the idea of wanting to help, though it doesn't have the ring of specific empathy. "My first time wasn't that interesting--" The waiter approaches with food, and she cuts off the conversation until he is out of earshot again, before beginning to eat and recounting her own story.
Andre lifts his hands from the table as the waiter deposits the pasta before him, offering a word of thanks before turning his attention back to Zenith. Fork twirls among noodles (nevermind that it's rigatoni and not spaghetti), and expression shows receptiveness to further storytelling.
Andre and Zenith have dinner. It seems that their intended tracks of conversation are not so much parallel as on completely different planes.
The restaurant, with its light cafe atmosphere, is not so busy now at dinnertime as it apparently is at lunch, judging by the well-kept and prosperous air of the place, but for someone looking for a good compromise between 'coffee' and 'dinner' in the matter of meetings, it's an ideal compromise. No candles, no romatically lowered lights, just good food. Zenith, relaxed in her chair at the table for two, is dressed similarly--the dressy layered waves of material of her dark green skirt around her knees is paired with the simplicity of a pale peach top, patterned with faux old-timey flower patterns labeled in French or something similarly unreadable. The neckline isn't even showing cleavage--yet.
For all his increasing experience with crutches and public transportation, Andre is still a couple of minutes later than the time they agreed upon over the phone. Not late enough to be considered unfashionable if this were a group meeting, but still enough that the expression crossing his cold-reddened features when he is directed to the proper table is more sheepish than salutatory. He's wearing dark pants and a deep red turtleneck sweater with a zipper in the collar. It's slightly unzipped, showing the worn-out edge of a t-shirt collar underneath. "Hey, sorry!" he says as he maneuvers himself into a seat, propping his crutches up against the edge of the table.
Zenith waves that away, setting down the water she had been sipping at to smile over at him. "It's hardly your fault." She inclines her head towards the crutches. "How're you doing?" Her tone softens the question into something more sincere than the usual conversational ritual.
Andre appears as if he's going to answer the question, but that little tickly feeling in the back of his sinuses decides to answer first. He's able to liberate his napkin from the silverware it protects in time to block the sneeze from being too loud or disgusting, but there is a sneeze nevertheless. He then holds up one index finger in an indication to wait as he takes a sip of the glass of water already waiting for him. "Better than I was when you called," he clarifies at last. "Sneezing means there's airflow in there, which is more than I could say for last week. What about you?"
"I thought your voice sounded a little--" Zenith gestures vaguely to her own sinuses. She looks more than a little disappointed, and she drops her chin into a palm she brings up, propping her elbow on the table, to look at him a little sideways. "So you still feeling pretty sick, then?"
Andre has stashed the napkin in his lap, ready to be drawn quickly in case of another impending sneeze. He lifts both hands, palms facing out, toward Zenith. "I'm not going to get close enough to infect anyone, I promise. If it's even still contagious." One hand descends to rest on the table, and the other lifts the water again. "Not so much anymore. Just tired more than anything else. But seriously, when you called, that was already /progress/." The slight choking noise he makes is a manner of commentary, not an actual choke.
Zenith reaches out to touch Andre's hand, a light brush of her thumb over the back of it before she settles it back on her side of the table again. "Not close enough to infect anyone makes for a very boring evening," she says, straightforward, straight-faced, but eyes dancing. "Aren't you most contagious, like, just when you first have it?"
Andre's brows raise slightly and he pulls his head back, chin nearing his collarbone. The fingers of the hand that Zenith has touched tapping lightly against the table. "I'm really not sure. That's what they say, I guess, but this thing's miserable enough that I don't want to take chances of inflicting it on anyone." The caution in his tone is genuine. "At least I was on leave for work this concert cycle anyway. Eesh." He sips the water. "How go the plans for your show?"
Zenith settles back, and flips through her menu absently. After a moment, she sighs, and then suddenly brightens as a thought occurs. "I think I would have gotten that already, though, if it's what's been going around--a couple people I've talked to have had it, and still no signs for me. I should be safe." She presents the last sentence hopefully, tapping her own fingers in a idle pattern on the table to bring her hand into touching distance. "Anyway. I talked to your manager chick, and she wouldn't commit, but it's at least hopeful. But I guess you probably already knew that."
"Really? Then I guess you've got resistance in the genes or something. Lucky..." Andre shakes his head, pushing air out slightly parted lips. When dealing with percussionists, tapping is contagious, and what was a sporadic flicker of Andre's hand turns into a more consistent cadence. It manifests in practically in motion alone, though; the faint trace of sound is muted. "She wouldn't?" He frowns slightly. "That's pretty weird of her. As far as I could tell on my timing, she's good about auditions. But maybe it's because it's midseason and you're a soloist, in a way."
Playfully, Zenith tries to mirror the rhythm, frowning as she tries and fails to capture the finer points. She turns the game into stalking his fingers with her own instead. "Well, I probably sounded scattered, and unprofessional." Zenith uses her other hand to rub the side of her face. "There's /so/ many details, and I haven't been able to find people with the experience to take care of them yet. Not that I don't have the money, but I'm just not sure where to look." She shrugs one shoulder. "Soloist, yeah. My partner's kind of a jerk. He said fuck no to letting me try to float him too."
Andre snorts in amusement. Not in sinus pain. "Scattered and unprofessional? Man, you seriously haven't spent much time around professional musicians. You'd find the term to be an /utter/ oxymoron, especially with some of the woodwinds." The rhythm of his fingers persists, unmarked and changing, more Rite of Spring than Bolero. "I guess /I/ could ask her about the stuff we did with the ballet. Maybe their agent's the better one to go by..." At the declaration of no floating, he frowns exaggeratedly. "Huh, really? I thought the point of dancing was to look weightless! Why not go the whole way?"
"I /like/ you," Zenith says, light and laughing but no less sincere. She attempts to slip her hand under his so he's tapping against her palm rather than the table. "Anything you could do to help it along, I'd be very grateful." She looks down for a moment, shaking her head. "I dunno. I guess maybe it's different if you're not in control of it? I have no idea what that feels like, obviously. I thought we had the trust, but maybe not enough for that." She looks up suddenly, expression a little more serious. "I did it to you when we first met. It wasn't so freaky, was it?"
The slipping maneuver works. It takes Andre's fingers a few moments to register that the surface beneath them is no longer table, and the tapping persists until that point, at which it halts abruptly. He looks down at the hands, then uses his other to again partake of his water. "I wasn't freaked. I mean, surprised, sure, but not freaked. Freaked was getting the leg broken to begin with. Not having it relieved of its weightbearing duties after the fact."
"Happy to do it again, if you need it," Zenith offered. "Walk you home if you want." She grins--meaningfully. She flexes her hand, inviting him to continue his rhythm. "Injuries? Definitely freaky." She exhales in amusement at the obviousness of the comment. She's interrupted by the advent of a waiter, but she orders the soup of the day and salad without recourse to her abandoned menu.
"Walk me home?" Andre repeats, the end of the sentence going to a higher note than most questions entail, brows lifting exaggeratedly. "We haven't even ordered and you're already trying to get rid of me?" He's practically whining, but in a way that could only be interpreted as serious if one had never heard a serious complaint before. The sound degenerates into a soft laugh. His hand reflexively twitches at the poking. Andre requests pasta of the waiter, then continues more seriously, "Don't plan on having that kind of freaky again."
"We haven't even--we've just ordered--and I'm already trying to figure out what I have to look forward to," Zenith says, lips quirked, slipping a bra-strap back into place that may or may not have been out of place. "You taking self-defense classes or something?" she asks.
Andre laughs out loud at the question, shaking his head, both hands lifting to point parallel index fingers at the crutches resting against the table's edge. "You're kidding me, right? I can't even stand well enough to do the wax-on-wax-off bit right now, let alone the crane maneuver!" It is possible that someone has been watching classic movies while sick. "I had a little bit of judo before it happened. It was...less than effective in this case."
Zenith wrinkles her nose at her phrasing, and waves a hand. "I meant planning to. When you're healed up. Yeah, not right now. That would be impressive." She grins at him. "Well, the time I got mugged, I thought my powers would be a good defense, but they turned out a little...too effective." She looks aside, lost in her own thoughts and memories.
Andre's hands now fall to the edge of the table, one on either side of his place setting, fingers picking up a slower and steadier cadence than before, though just as noiseless. "I probably should, though I do want to wait before it's good and healed. Don't want to dislodge all the hardware they stuck in there." He frowns at that concept, but the expression on the whole lifts to one of morbid curiosity at the second part of Zenith's remarks. "Oh man...What did you /do/?"
"Well--" For once in the evening, Zenith looks insecure, rather than focused on her goal. "As long as you promise not to be scared off. Or let my tits outweigh the impulse, anyway." She laughs, a little nervous, a lot awkward. "I threw the guy back. Threw everything back--" Her hands cup around a central point, and then she pulls them outwards, illustrating the expanding circle. "Including a bystander through a window. Mugger booked, and I got arrested for 'attacking' the other guy." She lets out a long breath. "So now you know my dark secret. What's yours?"
Andre's eyes open wider, and indeed may be the most focused directly on Zenith's face that they have been all evening thus far. "Oh maaan..." he reiterates, the sound of the last word diffusing into a soft laugh, amused and impressed. Perhaps even a little nervous. The open laugh turns into a sound produced at the back of his sinuses, then silences into a shake of his head. He lifts his hands and knits the fingers together, propping his elbows on the table and his chin on his fingers. "Jeez, you could've tried to slam the bystander guy for obstruction of justice if his story's what landed you in jail!" His head tilts slightly on the fulcrum of his hands. "Mine is just...not /that/ good of a story!"
"Oh, no. He was in a coma," Zenith says, a little bitterly. She searches his expression, apparently trying to read his reaction. She doesn't come away with enough to make her tense further, but not enough to make her relax, either. "Oh, please. Tell. It's only fair."
Andre's upper lip wrinkles upward, showing a hint of teeth and a lot of disapproval. "He was in a coma," Andre repeats. "So he could not testify against you, and they still couldn't handle self defense as legit on your part?" He coughs, rattly with residual congestion. "I guess that's really not as surprising as I'd like it to be, though. I had this museum gig once, and this cop caught me leaving and assumed I had no reason to be there and also automatically figured I was a mutant because of it."
Zenith sets her shoulders, trying to settle out the tension of recounting it. "Helpful witness. Saw the bystander come through the window, not the mugger--'Oh, yes, officer, the nasty mutant just up and attacked the guy.'" She makes an effort to smile. "But hey, I'm not in jail. The justice system seems to have worked." She tilts her head. "A mutant? One that teleported inside, or what?" She manages a laugh.
Andre is not smiling at the description of events. He bites his lower lip and looks down at Zenith's hands for a few seconds. When he looks back up, the jolt of his general motion, from the wider opening of eyes to the release of his clasped fingers, is as if he's coming out of some sudden deep thought. "Good that you're not! And I have /no/ idea what this cop thought, other than mutant in general. Not a clue. But I'll tell you, if I could do something so useful as teleporting, do you think I would have stuck around to get my leg snapped?"
Zenith's smile winks into life at Andre's endorsement of the fact she's not in jail, and she exhales in amusement. "I would certainly think not." She shakes her head. "Because anyone robbing a museum would obviously be a mutant, too." She snorts. "Anyway, this is kind of a depressing topic. If we start talking about the political situation for mutants--" Fortunately, this is interrupted by the arrival of her salad, and topic changes are put aside for taking a few bites.
The pasta that Andre ordered does not come with salad, but there is a basket of bread deposited on the table between him and Zenith, and he takes a slice of a darker loaf with whole seeds on the crust, proceeding to butter it lightly. His concentration on this task seems rather exaggerated -- tight mouth, intensely-focused eyes, set jaw. When the bread has had its covering, though, he does not yet bite it. It is held between two fingers, and the same two fingers on the opposite hand wave in a casual manner that is almost contradictory to his expression. "I mean, she was technically right, but it was totally not relevant to the situation."
Zenith pauses, a forkful of lettuce halfway to her mouth, to look up. Then she finishes the bite, and sets the fork down before turning her attention to belatedly spreading her napkin over her lap, and smoothing out the wrinkles. "Oh?" she says, lightly.
"Not about the robbing the bank part," Andre clarifies, choosing that moment for a strategic bite of bread. He chews slowly. His eyes remain wide and alert.
"Well, you know I'm one. I'm hardly going to freak out at you for it," Zenith says leadingly, jumping a few steps in the conversation.
Andre finishes chewing, then places the slice of bread on the appetizer plate, then lifts the napkin, then dabs his mouth, then sets it down, then drinks some water, then swallows. It is not a slow process in terms of time, but the silence associated with it makes it feel like a run-on sentence with the sound off. And yet, with that buildup, the end statement is simple. "I stop earthquakes." Shrug.
Zenith finally looks at him, but more out of curiosity and interest than surprise. "Ones that you're in? Or anywhere?" She chances a smile. "That could be useful. You should move to California."
"Ones that I'm in," Andre explains, lifting the bread again. It just hovers in his hand somewhere in the vicinity of his mouth, though, as he gives a brief snort to Zenith's suggestion, lips twisting into a smirk. "I grew up in California. That's how I found out I could do this."
Zenith finally goes for bread of her own, leaving about half of her salad in the plate-scattered state that suggests she's not planning to come back to it. She smiles a little wanly as she considers her own suggestion again. "No complex about saving the world, then? Probably more sensible." Her lips quirk as a thought occurs. "That must have been...interesting, the first time."
There is a distance in Andre's eyes when he regards Zenith now. He faces her, that's certain, and his eyes seem to be looking nearly in hers, but there's some lack of focus in the brown irises. "It was...really strange, yeah. Loma Prieta. 1989. I just got really tired all of a sudden and went to lie down, and then there were news things and phone calls and sirens and there was smoke visible over the bay and people were talking about quakes, but I felt nothing. It postponed the World Series, I felt nothing. Didn't know why at the time." He runs a finger along the rim of his water glass and lowers his voice. "I have to admit, when I hear there was a big one that killed people, I feel guilty I wasn't there to help. Even though I know it's not practical."
Zenith nods. "Yeah," she agrees generally to the idea of wanting to help, though it doesn't have the ring of specific empathy. "My first time wasn't that interesting--" The waiter approaches with food, and she cuts off the conversation until he is out of earshot again, before beginning to eat and recounting her own story.
Andre lifts his hands from the table as the waiter deposits the pasta before him, offering a word of thanks before turning his attention back to Zenith. Fork twirls among noodles (nevermind that it's rigatoni and not spaghetti), and expression shows receptiveness to further storytelling.
Andre and Zenith have dinner. It seems that their intended tracks of conversation are not so much parallel as on completely different planes.