The morning after
She has a lot of nerve.
Which is not to say that she's not absolutely right.
Hate that.
2/13/2006
Logfile from Shaw of X-Men MUCK.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hellfire Clubhouse - Hidden Circle
Stark, spartan luxury wraps this round room in black and white, perfectly balanced to honor those who represent the colors here and in the outer world. The only furniture is an ebony table and its set of matching chairs, centered on the white floor within the plain white walls. The table's horseshoe opens at one end to permit supplicants and other displays at the Circle's center, and curves at its head in front of matched pairs of thrones carved with royal symbols: King and Queen, White and Black.
A stout metal door beyond the table's open end leads to the basement. Another, smaller door opens from the security watchpost.
--
It's too early for much more than the night staff to be out and about on the grounds and inside the house. Habits are hard to kill, even if their reasons are dead. Pushed out of bed by the former, and with the latter frustrating an attempt to meditate, Emma is reduced to prowling. The secreted depths of the mansion are a good place to prowl, especially to answer a niggling questions, and so the elevator disgorges her into the night-dark hallway outside the Circle meeting room.
Where a slump-shoulder man stands on guard in full Black Pawn regalia: uniform, mask, and sidearm. The latter is currently being dislodged in strange and dangerous ways by his vigorous scratching all around the hem of the uniform's buttoned tunic. He's trying to reach /under/ it, get at itchy waist and ribs, and that sends the butt of the gun knocking into the wall behind him and the holstered muzzle slithering down and around his thigh. But he keeps working at it! He is both dutiful and persistent.
Emma eyes the pawn with something like bemused puzzlement, and not a little dismissal as she taps down the hallway toward the door he guards. She is Queen, and this is her domain.
The mask twitches her way, and the pawn straightens up. Fast. And only mostly straight, actually: he's visibly swaying on his feet.
Hm. She approaches and passes and reaches for the door, pausing to send a slant-eyed glance at the tottering man before entering the room without a word to him. The door is pushed wide and left to swing shut behind her.
Well, the lights are on. There's that. Inset illumination in the ceiling, echoing and outlining the horseshoe-shaped table standing massively black on the cold white floor. They're dimmed to half, however, and really only sparkle on the pair of empty whiskey bottles, one squat and one lean, that serve as rearguard, final guard, for the man slumped over folded, silk-robed arms at the Black King's throne-like seat.
Emma is part-way to the watchpost door before the other occupant's presence registers, and only then by the heavy breathing that echoes into the cavernous room. She slows, then stops, turning to eye him underneath raised brows, her lips pressing into a thin line and hands perching on her hips as she watches him for a long moment. Her purpose in being here is abandoned, and she moves the circle around the edge of the table and draws near his seat up the inside of the horseshoe, calling out a flat warning of her approach about halfway up the length of the table. "Sebastian."
The shoulders twitch, under the rucked and rumpled black silk of a robe worn too long and too well, and Shaw makes a little rough noise as he tries to pull back from the approach without actually, well, moving. He buries his head deeper into his arms, like a turtle in its shell.
"Sebastian," Emma repeats, this time with more force and authority. She stops mid-floor, just out of arm's reach of the apex of curve. Crisp white lines of jacket and skirt set themselves counter to his rumpled black, wrinkling only at the inside of elbows bent to fold across her front.
"Emma, so help me, /God/, I am going to kill you." Shaw sounds far more tired than incensed, or even very threatening, however, and he hunches more tightly into his turtling. A sigh muffles into his folded arms. "Go away."
"No you're not. If you were, you would have done so long ago," she replies smoothly, dropping her arms and stepping forward to slide her hands onto the smooth surface of the table. They inch toward the bottles. Of course, the missing element to her assumption is, well... missing, but her poker face is on. "It's morning, in case you were at all concerned about getting caught down here, drunk-- or is it hungover by now?-- by someone other than me."
Shaw mutters, "Do it /now/, while you can't mentally stop me. Fuckin' telepaths--" He breaks off and tips his head to give her the benefit of one bleary, blinking, red-rimmed and -veined black eye. "Is there a meeting today? Circle meeting?" he asks with (mostly) clear worry.
"No, but this is not your private quarters, and people do frequent the facilities," Emma responds calmly, ignoring the muttered empty (she gauges) threats, aside from the further blanding of her expression. She picks up one of the bottles and turns it label up, prompting a small grimace.
It's Glenlivet; the other one, Glenfiddich. There is a thin slosh of pale amber liquor in each, but no more. Shaw puts his head back down. "Johnson still outside? I told him to guard until I left."
"Guard from who? He let me in without a word," Emma snorts, setting the bottle down with a glassy tink. "And when did you tell him that? How long have you been down here anyway?"
"Well, not you, obviously," is Shaw's sarcastic rejoinder as he pushes himself up to sitting -- slumping more upright, anyway. He keeps his arms folded and presses one hand flat on the table: hard, as if that would stop the fine trembling he's steadfastly ignoring in favor of staring up at her. "I don't answer to you. Do I?" Sarcasm becomes mockery. "Was there another leadership change, and I missed the memo?"
Emma tilts her head, a mild sneer lying lightly across her reply. "Of course not, my King," she says, smiling sweetly and sliding her hands back off the table. She steps back and inclines her head, then starts to turn.
Shaw sighs, "Bitch. What do you want?"
She hesitates and glances at him across a shoulder. "From you? Nothing, darling. I came down to review some security logs." Her hair swings out as she resumes her direction and momentum.
Suspicion narrows on her back. "Did we get invaded? --Fuck. Is it Grey again?"
That causes a misstep about halfway down the length of the table, and she looks back at him. "Inv-- No!" she exclaims, frowning across at him.
Shaw raises his hands to smooth back his hair (tousled, but apparently agreeing to be cooperative) and gazes at her bleakly through the frame of heels and robed wrists. "Well, she might," he says reasonably. "Come back to finish the job. You don't know. It's safe down here, at least. Probably."
"From all reports, Jean Grey has disappeared," Emma informs him cautiously, taking a wary step back in his direction. "And if she was intent on murdering anyone, she would start with me."
A rude noise slouches Shaw back into his throne. He crooks his shoulder against the carved back to keep himself upright, and rests his weight on an elbow to the carved arm. "Like she'd /stop/ there. She called me, you know. Cat and mouse. Not enough that she attacked me, beat me, got into my damn mind, /beat/ me . . ." His breath goes ragged, and he tips his head up into the chair's support. His throat works for a second on lumpy words, then he shakes his head and resumes calmly. "I think it's possible that she might want to return and play with us some more. I've planned for that contingency, just to be safe."
"It /is/ very possible, and a very good idea to be prepared. What plans have you made?" Emma asks, hands clasping behind her back as she edges closer, an arm's length away from the near edge of the table.
Shaw's other hand scrabbles on the chair's other arm: an aborted wave. "Harper's on it," he mutters. "Ask her. Not my job -- she can do it. God, I'm tired. I'm always tired."
"I will, then." Emma drifts an assessing glance over him--his face, his posture, his movements, and closes the remaining distance, leaning over the table, hands turned back to grip the edge of the table on either side of her hips. "Sebastian? Can I help?"
Shaw eyes her. The fumes are louder, this much closer, mingled in with the scents of dried sweat and stale skin. He /eyes/ her, and he looks tired, and smells tired, and sounds tired, and still he eyes her, trembling on a brink, a cusp, of -- of something, clouded and shadowed through his expression like a ghost's chill hand passing. "No," he says quietly, "I don't think you can. There's . . . too much."
Emma holds still, returns the look, holding her breath while he grapples with whatever decision he's making. And then he answers and she exhales, frowning sourly. She nods and straightens, replying peevishly, "Alright. I'm sure you'll let me know."
"Because what /can/ you do, Emma?" he continues in that low, steady (so, so steady) voice, not looking away from her. "You can't undo whatever she did in my head. You can't fix the metabolic damage I'm trying to ride out. You can't erase the /memories/." Voice breaks there. "All you can do is watch. Same as I'm doing. Just watch me spiral my way down and enjoy the show."
"Certainly. You're right, as always. I'm sure it will be a splendid show, and there's no point to my even offering, is there, Sebastian?" Emma spits caustically, then half-turns and steps back to lean against the table, its curving edge cradling her. Bright eyes darken and glitter in the lowered illumination. "What a fine pair of crippled wretches we are, hmm?"
Shaw chuckles thickly. "We get the job done. Club's still standing; Circle's still -- mostly -- whole. Wide Awake is . . . no, I'm not in any state to talk about that, but remind me for later, sometime." He lolls his head back again, closes his eyes, and breathes for a minute. "It can't have failed to register with you, my dear, that I don't trust very easily and that we /have/ had some amount of burned bridges on both sides now."
"And yet we're still both here, aren't we? Throwing stones across the chasm of our hostility. No, Sebastian. It hasn't failed to register. I've always been the more observant one, after all." Emma smirks at that and kicks her heel against the cold floor.
The skin around Shaw's eyes tightens, deepening the wrinkles there. "Do I still look like a walking corpse to you?"
"You might as well, for all the sense I have of you," Emma tosses back, unaware and glaring down at the floor.
Shaw flinches. "Is that all we are to you telepaths?" he asks with bitterness poking through his flattened, hoarse drawl. "Meat puppets? Walking corpses? Without your precious powers, without your divine inner sense of who we really are -- we're just /objects/ to you. /Things/. /Toys/." He hits each word with rising emphasis until the passion runs out, and his head thunks back against carved black wood, and he's done. "You will excuse me if I don't fucking weep for you. I am /more/ than my mind or your sense of it, so fuck your mundane perceptions."
Emma tightens into a tense conductor of angry amazement. She laughs and pushes away from the table, pacing into the center of the arena before the thrones. "You are a colossal ass, Sebastian Shaw, and to hear that complaint from you, of all people, proves that Fate has the most twisted sense of humor. You will excuse me in turn, I'm sure, if I simply call you a hypocrite."
"I don't have the right to complain?" Shaw inquires.
"About being considered a toy? A puppet? An /object/ for your manipulation?" Emma laughs harshly. "No, my darling. You don't. And consider for a moment your own future, when your mutation fails you utterly and completely, when you sneer at /me/, King."
Shaw hits his head again against the heavy wood behind him. "It's all I can think about," he tells her tonelessly. "Every word I say to you, I weigh and judge, knowing that it will come back to me at the right moment to give me another cut when I least expect it. I can't trust you because I can't /relax/ with you, Emma Frost." Disgust -- self-disgust -- pushes him lower in the chair and his voice lower, too, into furry basso rumbles. "I did too fucking good a job on you, my telepathic Barbie. Too fucking good a job by a long shot."
Emma stills her pacing and faces him squarely, arms folding in front, eyes narrowing, frown cementing. "At least you admit that much," she says, thick with scorn.
Shaw's eyes crack open, revealing slits of muddy black hatred. "Well, apparently all you have to do to get me to confess my sins is have me betrayed, tortured, and beaten bloody by my personal physician, who has conveniently lost all her ethics and taken a dump on the Hippocratic Oath. Then just give me a few bottles, let me stew in my impotence and depression for a while, and ask me whatever the fuck you want. That's not so hard, is it?" His chin tilts up in support of a thinly bladed smile. "Was it good for you, too, darling?"
"Immensely satisfying," she purrs back.
"Bitch," he says again, but smiles more softly.
"You like it," and she smiles back, comfortable and familiar challenge in the accusation.
Shaw sighs. "At least until you stab me in the back again." He rubs thumb and forefinger into his eyes' inner corners. "You aren't planning on that, are you?"
"Not planning, no," she says with a shrug. "You aren't planning on making it necessary again, are you?" A pointed glance at the bottles, and then her eyes return to his face, her own calm contained.
Shaw looks up to see the tail of the pointed glance, and gives it a half-hearted glare in return. "My own damn business, woman. Back off. You think I can't manage my drinking after all these years? --No, wait, here's where you say that that's exactly what you think, based on the evidence before you, so I'll just save you the trouble and do my own flogging, /thank/ you."
Emma simply smirks as he drives any point she /might/ have been considering making home all on his own. And then, "Anything I can do to help, darling?"
"We've been over that," Shaw reminds her as he struggles to sit up with at least a modicum of dignity. (His hair snags on a flaw in the chair back. Damn. And also: ow.) He rubs his whole face now. ". . . No. I'm probably capable of walking back to my quarters by myself, and the thought of you tucking me in turns my stomach." And shadows his expression again, with distaste, discomfort -- something. He looks away.
Emma purses her lips, nose crinkling, and nods before turning away, this time to /really/ go about her original purpose for being down here at this hour of the morning.
Shaw lets her go, without watching her go, instead rubbing at his eyes again, some more, and then levering himself up to standing. He looks red-eyed at the door across the room, his way out, and slowly starts around the outside of the table, opposite her, to get there.
[Log ends.]
Which is not to say that she's not absolutely right.
Hate that.
2/13/2006
Logfile from Shaw of X-Men MUCK.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hellfire Clubhouse - Hidden Circle
Stark, spartan luxury wraps this round room in black and white, perfectly balanced to honor those who represent the colors here and in the outer world. The only furniture is an ebony table and its set of matching chairs, centered on the white floor within the plain white walls. The table's horseshoe opens at one end to permit supplicants and other displays at the Circle's center, and curves at its head in front of matched pairs of thrones carved with royal symbols: King and Queen, White and Black.
A stout metal door beyond the table's open end leads to the basement. Another, smaller door opens from the security watchpost.
--
It's too early for much more than the night staff to be out and about on the grounds and inside the house. Habits are hard to kill, even if their reasons are dead. Pushed out of bed by the former, and with the latter frustrating an attempt to meditate, Emma is reduced to prowling. The secreted depths of the mansion are a good place to prowl, especially to answer a niggling questions, and so the elevator disgorges her into the night-dark hallway outside the Circle meeting room.
Where a slump-shoulder man stands on guard in full Black Pawn regalia: uniform, mask, and sidearm. The latter is currently being dislodged in strange and dangerous ways by his vigorous scratching all around the hem of the uniform's buttoned tunic. He's trying to reach /under/ it, get at itchy waist and ribs, and that sends the butt of the gun knocking into the wall behind him and the holstered muzzle slithering down and around his thigh. But he keeps working at it! He is both dutiful and persistent.
Emma eyes the pawn with something like bemused puzzlement, and not a little dismissal as she taps down the hallway toward the door he guards. She is Queen, and this is her domain.
The mask twitches her way, and the pawn straightens up. Fast. And only mostly straight, actually: he's visibly swaying on his feet.
Hm. She approaches and passes and reaches for the door, pausing to send a slant-eyed glance at the tottering man before entering the room without a word to him. The door is pushed wide and left to swing shut behind her.
Well, the lights are on. There's that. Inset illumination in the ceiling, echoing and outlining the horseshoe-shaped table standing massively black on the cold white floor. They're dimmed to half, however, and really only sparkle on the pair of empty whiskey bottles, one squat and one lean, that serve as rearguard, final guard, for the man slumped over folded, silk-robed arms at the Black King's throne-like seat.
Emma is part-way to the watchpost door before the other occupant's presence registers, and only then by the heavy breathing that echoes into the cavernous room. She slows, then stops, turning to eye him underneath raised brows, her lips pressing into a thin line and hands perching on her hips as she watches him for a long moment. Her purpose in being here is abandoned, and she moves the circle around the edge of the table and draws near his seat up the inside of the horseshoe, calling out a flat warning of her approach about halfway up the length of the table. "Sebastian."
The shoulders twitch, under the rucked and rumpled black silk of a robe worn too long and too well, and Shaw makes a little rough noise as he tries to pull back from the approach without actually, well, moving. He buries his head deeper into his arms, like a turtle in its shell.
"Sebastian," Emma repeats, this time with more force and authority. She stops mid-floor, just out of arm's reach of the apex of curve. Crisp white lines of jacket and skirt set themselves counter to his rumpled black, wrinkling only at the inside of elbows bent to fold across her front.
"Emma, so help me, /God/, I am going to kill you." Shaw sounds far more tired than incensed, or even very threatening, however, and he hunches more tightly into his turtling. A sigh muffles into his folded arms. "Go away."
"No you're not. If you were, you would have done so long ago," she replies smoothly, dropping her arms and stepping forward to slide her hands onto the smooth surface of the table. They inch toward the bottles. Of course, the missing element to her assumption is, well... missing, but her poker face is on. "It's morning, in case you were at all concerned about getting caught down here, drunk-- or is it hungover by now?-- by someone other than me."
Shaw mutters, "Do it /now/, while you can't mentally stop me. Fuckin' telepaths--" He breaks off and tips his head to give her the benefit of one bleary, blinking, red-rimmed and -veined black eye. "Is there a meeting today? Circle meeting?" he asks with (mostly) clear worry.
"No, but this is not your private quarters, and people do frequent the facilities," Emma responds calmly, ignoring the muttered empty (she gauges) threats, aside from the further blanding of her expression. She picks up one of the bottles and turns it label up, prompting a small grimace.
It's Glenlivet; the other one, Glenfiddich. There is a thin slosh of pale amber liquor in each, but no more. Shaw puts his head back down. "Johnson still outside? I told him to guard until I left."
"Guard from who? He let me in without a word," Emma snorts, setting the bottle down with a glassy tink. "And when did you tell him that? How long have you been down here anyway?"
"Well, not you, obviously," is Shaw's sarcastic rejoinder as he pushes himself up to sitting -- slumping more upright, anyway. He keeps his arms folded and presses one hand flat on the table: hard, as if that would stop the fine trembling he's steadfastly ignoring in favor of staring up at her. "I don't answer to you. Do I?" Sarcasm becomes mockery. "Was there another leadership change, and I missed the memo?"
Emma tilts her head, a mild sneer lying lightly across her reply. "Of course not, my King," she says, smiling sweetly and sliding her hands back off the table. She steps back and inclines her head, then starts to turn.
Shaw sighs, "Bitch. What do you want?"
She hesitates and glances at him across a shoulder. "From you? Nothing, darling. I came down to review some security logs." Her hair swings out as she resumes her direction and momentum.
Suspicion narrows on her back. "Did we get invaded? --Fuck. Is it Grey again?"
That causes a misstep about halfway down the length of the table, and she looks back at him. "Inv-- No!" she exclaims, frowning across at him.
Shaw raises his hands to smooth back his hair (tousled, but apparently agreeing to be cooperative) and gazes at her bleakly through the frame of heels and robed wrists. "Well, she might," he says reasonably. "Come back to finish the job. You don't know. It's safe down here, at least. Probably."
"From all reports, Jean Grey has disappeared," Emma informs him cautiously, taking a wary step back in his direction. "And if she was intent on murdering anyone, she would start with me."
A rude noise slouches Shaw back into his throne. He crooks his shoulder against the carved back to keep himself upright, and rests his weight on an elbow to the carved arm. "Like she'd /stop/ there. She called me, you know. Cat and mouse. Not enough that she attacked me, beat me, got into my damn mind, /beat/ me . . ." His breath goes ragged, and he tips his head up into the chair's support. His throat works for a second on lumpy words, then he shakes his head and resumes calmly. "I think it's possible that she might want to return and play with us some more. I've planned for that contingency, just to be safe."
"It /is/ very possible, and a very good idea to be prepared. What plans have you made?" Emma asks, hands clasping behind her back as she edges closer, an arm's length away from the near edge of the table.
Shaw's other hand scrabbles on the chair's other arm: an aborted wave. "Harper's on it," he mutters. "Ask her. Not my job -- she can do it. God, I'm tired. I'm always tired."
"I will, then." Emma drifts an assessing glance over him--his face, his posture, his movements, and closes the remaining distance, leaning over the table, hands turned back to grip the edge of the table on either side of her hips. "Sebastian? Can I help?"
Shaw eyes her. The fumes are louder, this much closer, mingled in with the scents of dried sweat and stale skin. He /eyes/ her, and he looks tired, and smells tired, and sounds tired, and still he eyes her, trembling on a brink, a cusp, of -- of something, clouded and shadowed through his expression like a ghost's chill hand passing. "No," he says quietly, "I don't think you can. There's . . . too much."
Emma holds still, returns the look, holding her breath while he grapples with whatever decision he's making. And then he answers and she exhales, frowning sourly. She nods and straightens, replying peevishly, "Alright. I'm sure you'll let me know."
"Because what /can/ you do, Emma?" he continues in that low, steady (so, so steady) voice, not looking away from her. "You can't undo whatever she did in my head. You can't fix the metabolic damage I'm trying to ride out. You can't erase the /memories/." Voice breaks there. "All you can do is watch. Same as I'm doing. Just watch me spiral my way down and enjoy the show."
"Certainly. You're right, as always. I'm sure it will be a splendid show, and there's no point to my even offering, is there, Sebastian?" Emma spits caustically, then half-turns and steps back to lean against the table, its curving edge cradling her. Bright eyes darken and glitter in the lowered illumination. "What a fine pair of crippled wretches we are, hmm?"
Shaw chuckles thickly. "We get the job done. Club's still standing; Circle's still -- mostly -- whole. Wide Awake is . . . no, I'm not in any state to talk about that, but remind me for later, sometime." He lolls his head back again, closes his eyes, and breathes for a minute. "It can't have failed to register with you, my dear, that I don't trust very easily and that we /have/ had some amount of burned bridges on both sides now."
"And yet we're still both here, aren't we? Throwing stones across the chasm of our hostility. No, Sebastian. It hasn't failed to register. I've always been the more observant one, after all." Emma smirks at that and kicks her heel against the cold floor.
The skin around Shaw's eyes tightens, deepening the wrinkles there. "Do I still look like a walking corpse to you?"
"You might as well, for all the sense I have of you," Emma tosses back, unaware and glaring down at the floor.
Shaw flinches. "Is that all we are to you telepaths?" he asks with bitterness poking through his flattened, hoarse drawl. "Meat puppets? Walking corpses? Without your precious powers, without your divine inner sense of who we really are -- we're just /objects/ to you. /Things/. /Toys/." He hits each word with rising emphasis until the passion runs out, and his head thunks back against carved black wood, and he's done. "You will excuse me if I don't fucking weep for you. I am /more/ than my mind or your sense of it, so fuck your mundane perceptions."
Emma tightens into a tense conductor of angry amazement. She laughs and pushes away from the table, pacing into the center of the arena before the thrones. "You are a colossal ass, Sebastian Shaw, and to hear that complaint from you, of all people, proves that Fate has the most twisted sense of humor. You will excuse me in turn, I'm sure, if I simply call you a hypocrite."
"I don't have the right to complain?" Shaw inquires.
"About being considered a toy? A puppet? An /object/ for your manipulation?" Emma laughs harshly. "No, my darling. You don't. And consider for a moment your own future, when your mutation fails you utterly and completely, when you sneer at /me/, King."
Shaw hits his head again against the heavy wood behind him. "It's all I can think about," he tells her tonelessly. "Every word I say to you, I weigh and judge, knowing that it will come back to me at the right moment to give me another cut when I least expect it. I can't trust you because I can't /relax/ with you, Emma Frost." Disgust -- self-disgust -- pushes him lower in the chair and his voice lower, too, into furry basso rumbles. "I did too fucking good a job on you, my telepathic Barbie. Too fucking good a job by a long shot."
Emma stills her pacing and faces him squarely, arms folding in front, eyes narrowing, frown cementing. "At least you admit that much," she says, thick with scorn.
Shaw's eyes crack open, revealing slits of muddy black hatred. "Well, apparently all you have to do to get me to confess my sins is have me betrayed, tortured, and beaten bloody by my personal physician, who has conveniently lost all her ethics and taken a dump on the Hippocratic Oath. Then just give me a few bottles, let me stew in my impotence and depression for a while, and ask me whatever the fuck you want. That's not so hard, is it?" His chin tilts up in support of a thinly bladed smile. "Was it good for you, too, darling?"
"Immensely satisfying," she purrs back.
"Bitch," he says again, but smiles more softly.
"You like it," and she smiles back, comfortable and familiar challenge in the accusation.
Shaw sighs. "At least until you stab me in the back again." He rubs thumb and forefinger into his eyes' inner corners. "You aren't planning on that, are you?"
"Not planning, no," she says with a shrug. "You aren't planning on making it necessary again, are you?" A pointed glance at the bottles, and then her eyes return to his face, her own calm contained.
Shaw looks up to see the tail of the pointed glance, and gives it a half-hearted glare in return. "My own damn business, woman. Back off. You think I can't manage my drinking after all these years? --No, wait, here's where you say that that's exactly what you think, based on the evidence before you, so I'll just save you the trouble and do my own flogging, /thank/ you."
Emma simply smirks as he drives any point she /might/ have been considering making home all on his own. And then, "Anything I can do to help, darling?"
"We've been over that," Shaw reminds her as he struggles to sit up with at least a modicum of dignity. (His hair snags on a flaw in the chair back. Damn. And also: ow.) He rubs his whole face now. ". . . No. I'm probably capable of walking back to my quarters by myself, and the thought of you tucking me in turns my stomach." And shadows his expression again, with distaste, discomfort -- something. He looks away.
Emma purses her lips, nose crinkling, and nods before turning away, this time to /really/ go about her original purpose for being down here at this hour of the morning.
Shaw lets her go, without watching her go, instead rubbing at his eyes again, some more, and then levering himself up to standing. He looks red-eyed at the door across the room, his way out, and slowly starts around the outside of the table, opposite her, to get there.
[Log ends.]