Dinner talk
He'll keep an eye out - an eye on. On me. That's all I wanted; that's all I need, until I find the itch that's been bothering me for the past few weeks and scratch it raw, finally and for good. This time, anyway.
Hope the al-Razis come up with something tomorrow night. Hope we find a fresh direction for tackling this problem. (Is that what I'm looking for? Not personal itches to quiet, but political ones?) It might be good to let the noise over the safehouse attack die down a little more, but then, it might not be. The iron's still hot and ready for striking. We just need to be sure we're forging the metal, not cracking it.
I feel better. Glad we met. Should have done it sooner.
5/3/2006
Logfile from Shaw of X-Men MUCK.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The dinner hour in one of New York City's best old steakhouses, buzzingly busy with mostly white-collar clientele chowing down on thick slabs of meat and more hearty sides than they know what to do with. A booth in the back stands shielded by the ambient noise and the discreet ushering of servitors. With gentlemanly skill and patience, Shaw carves off a chunk of his porterhouse steak, swirls it through the potatoes' gravy drizzled alongside, and pops it into his mouth. After he's chewed and swallowed, he levels the fork at Percy across the table and urges, slicing off a smile to follow the bite, "Tell me this isn't better than having yet another boring damn meeting in my office."
"Oh ... I don't know." The words are as languid as the slow smile, dark lashes slipping low over amber's indolent gleam, just as leisurely as the jag of serrated blade through the meat of his pepper-crusted filet mignon. "Your girl there is decently hot." Percy pauses mid-slice to retrieve his glass, moistening his lips with wine over a partial smirk.
A startled blink pauses Shaw for a second's thought. Catching up with a skewed hook to his mouth, he shrugs and digs into more meat. "/That/ office. I couldn't immediately come up with any new attractive pawns in the clubhouse. But you mean . . . right." He chews slowly, eyes on his plate. They lift as he picks up his wineglass for a short swallow, and they look flat and empty in the warm lighting overhead. "Zoe McMillan has become a valuable asset to the company. It's good of you to notice."
The breath that escapes through Percy's nose is neither snort nor snicker, torn between aspirations of both. He sets down his glass and forks his sliver of steak into his mouth, rolling his eyes ceilingwards as he chews. "It is nice to get out and about," he allows, almost leaving dear Zoe alone. But then he wanders back there anyway. "Easy little thing. No self-respect. I had her in two minutes a few months ago and it wasn't like I was /trying/."
The wineglass goes back on the table; the utensils go back in Shaw's capable fists. He doesn't do anything with them right away, but asks in a polite and even tone, "So what would you say if she were involved with the boss?"
Percy's eyebrows climb, thin and dark over whiskeyed eyes that laugh and give the lie to his solemn mouth. "Were you /bored/?"
A frown's his answer, but Shaw's tone takes the edge off the expression: bemused, reflective. "Possibly. I would prefer that interpretation to what I'd come up with on my own." He shakes his head slightly and shifts his shoulders under the armor of his sleek chocolate-dark suit. "Care to put on your advisor's hat, Percy? Or -- maybe a friend's."
Percy shrugs back against the seat, shoulders rolling into an easy slouch that crinkles the smooth lines of his pale suit, moonlit grey. He twirls his fork in his fingers for something to occupy them, smile faint and wry as he spends the moment ignoring his food and paying attention to his companion. "Fire away."
"Thank you," Shaw murmurs, somewhere between ironic and automatic. A skirling breath of air following a passing waiter comes loaded with fresh food scents and layered, overlapping pheromones, including the prickly male mark of his own. He eats a bite of potatoes, then puts the utensils down and cups a hand around the wineglass's stem. Light casts blood through its contents onto his skin. "I think," he says almost casually, "that my death wish is trying to find fulfillment these days."
Percy's expression blanks, and then blends into skepticism with the furrow of his brow. He leans forward again, tipping his head slightly to one side. "How do you mean? From /McMillan/?"
"Oh, God, not really -- well." Shaw stops himself and shakes his head again. "It could be," he allows, toying with the glass, watching the shadow-fall of wine-light on his hand. His brows are knuckled over dark, dark eyes. "Undermining myself, just begging for a lawsuit . . . I got into a fight last week with one of Magneto's henchmen, Percy. How's that for walking on the wild side?"
Percy blinks. Then he lowers a contemplative glance to his plate, silent as he works his knife through several thin slices of steak. "A bit on the mad side." The tines of his fork dig deep into the pink-red flesh of medium rare meat; he jerks the fork up, pointing it at Shaw. "Restless?"
A tip of his free hand, accepting or equivocating. Shaw's hooded expression doesn't provide a guidepost to disambiguation. "I get that way every now and then," he answers. "But like this? Shit. Brawling with a wanted terrorist, sleeping with an employee -- I'm worried." He says it quietly, looking somewhere around Percy's second button from the top of his shirt. "I'd like you to -- I don't know, stop me if I really go off the deep end. That's your job."
Percy sits up a little straighter in his seat, the smile that ghosts over his lips bearing something of a sardonic edge. He doesn't speak until he has chewed, and swallowed, and aimed the tines of his fork at a diagonal in one curled fist, towards his plate. "Want me to hang about," he asks, just a little too lightly, voice dropping lower with the breath of surreptition as if it's even remotely necessary, "shut your drives down when you get too rowdy? I can do that, you know."
"No," Shaw says curtly, then draws in a breath. "Sorry. No, that won't be necessary. I'd sooner go down in flames than be castrated chemically -- no offense."
Percy bares his teeth in a grin that has very little to do with humor. "Right," he says, the syllable sketched with strange precision. "None taken."
"Right," Shaw throws back with some heat, though his jaw's clenched tight for control. "It's a kind offer, Percy, but not what I need. It isn't your particular gift that I want serving me, but your insight."
"At your service," Percy answers, turning the fork over in his fingers absent-mindedly. Bland solemnity shades to gilt cheer as he continues, "And for a start, I'll advise /not/ to throw punches at Magneto's minions in the future."
"No shit, Sherlock." The mutter gets drowned in a fast, hard swallow of wine, and Shaw thumps the glass back on the table as if it were a beer stein. Piqued, he stares at his Bishop with hot and pecking eyes: a raptor hunting clues like mice in the grass. "And don't fuck my admin assistant, either."
Percy shakes his head, mouth's quirk inching towards grimace; the slow sweep of long lashes indicates lazy unconcern. "I don't hit up one-night stands twice," he says. His fork slices into the side of his baked potato, the chunk's edges blurred with sour cream. He eats it, and then notes dryly, "Anyway I'm not really /fucking/ lately, so I wouldn't worry about it."
The hunting eyes narrow. "I meant me. If you want to have her, that's fine -- one way for me to slide out of this mess! -- but I meant /me/." Shaw pauses there, recoups with a return to eating. And a bland, testing tone: "I'm sorry to hear about it, though. Do you want to talk about it?"
Percy rubs his eyes with the middle finger and thumb of his left hand, letting fork fall idly over his plate as he makes a low-rumbled sound, partial grunt in the back of his throat. "Not especially. Sorry. My own bullshit, not important -- and never ask relationship advice from someone doped up on painkillers and dumb /anyway/," he adds, lifting head and hand both in admonition. "She wasn't bad or anything," he adds, tracking back onto Zenith, "but I can't see why you'd get /addicted/. What, uh," he waggles vague fingers, "how did /that/ start?"
An impatient sweep of Shaw's hand dismisses her (and nearly splatters gravy onto the tablecloth while he's at it). "Because I got bored. Restless, as you said. She was there, she was a mutant who didn't -- doesn't -- know that I am, too, and you know how I love to play that game, in private as much as in the media." He grimaces a self-mocking smile. "Simple amusement, huh? Harmless, as long as it doesn't end up in court."
"Nothing to worry about, right? If you stay careful." Percy sits back against the seat, food ignored for the moment as he traces the beginnings of shadow that ghost jaw with his knuckles. "You think she'll, ah -- slip the lead?"
"Maybe." Shaw chews on the idea like gristle. "Maybe. I'll try to cut her loose before it gets to that point . . . and this is a stupid thing to be talking about, isn't it?" The smile gets forced into more casual contours. "All over a silly slip of a girl, and a man my age, in my position."
"Just watch you don't go siring any bastards on your sister," Percy says, dryness a facetious drape over light words. "Never ends well." He shakes his head, sitting forward again to put fork to food as he speaks, solemnity layering over the words as his contemplative gaze focuses on meat and potato. "It's not stupid. As a concern, it's understandable. It might foul up. It could not."
A frozen beat of silence. "I had a sister once, actually," Shaw shares lightly, quite lightly. "Well, stillborn, but it still counts, right?"
Silence answers silence: blank, empty even of breathing. Oops. Percy blinks. And blinks again. "--Ah. Well. I was just -- going to this Camelot brought low over a girl -- place," he flounders after a moment.
"You didn't know," Shaw relents after a moment's bemused study of this flailing. "It was -- never mind. Just a comment, and not a well-timed one. I don't know why I said it. Speaking of family, though: how's your brother? I sent flowers. Don't know if he got them, but . . ."
"I'm sorry," Percy says, because this is actually what he should have said in the first place. And then: "He's got all manner of allergies," he says presently, briskly, latching onto safer ground. "Ashleigh has been taking care of the flowers and reading him all the cards. He's -- awake. Alive. Mumbling."
A blink. "Mumbling?"
"His speech -- he's not speaking that clearly yet," Percy explains, running the fingers of one hand through his hair. He retrieves his fork to prod at the remnant of his baked potato. "He's still slurring. Especially when they've got him on the drugs."
"Ah, of course." Shaw eyes his meal, then gives up on it in favor of nursing the last of his wine. "I've never been in the hospital, myself. Don't know how all that works -- but I'm glad he's doing better, and not just because I'm doing business with him." He spins that sentence into a jocular weave, weighted by his solemn stare. "You know what I mean."
Percy eyes Shaw for a moment. He is silent through a bite of steak, and then remarks with a certain innocuous blandness, "In his more lucid moments, he seems fairly inclined to sell."
The wineglass shivers briefly. Shaw steadies it against his lips for an equally bland swallow. "Oh? And marry Ashleigh and found a leper colony in Brazil, I suppose. Giving back to society."
"Fuck society," Percy chuckles through the words, lifting his own glass as he shakes his head. "He's never been cut out for this. He wants to go back to school." Informative and strangely flat, the words slip past his lips, curving into a wan little smile.
"Mmm. What do you think of that?"
"What right do I have to think?" The smile flashes broader, quicksilver and less than pleasant. "It isn't what my father wanted."
He gets a solemn, lip-pursed look. And Shaw wonders, "Would you stand to inherit?" And as quickly: "Would you want to?"
"The company? No. He can sell it. I don't believe William considered that a concern." Percy tips his head forward, frown plate-aimed. He adds, "And no. I wouldn't want to."
"I'm glad." Shaw passes it off coolly, as if the other man, his Bishop, had merely handed over the salt. "Too many divisions in your attention -- Christ, look at Linden. Tearing himself in half for me, and it'll be the death of him, just you watch."
"There are only so many balls one man can keep in the air," Percy agrees mildly. He forks the last of his steak to bring it to his mouth.
Nodding, Shaw finishes the last swallow of wine and sets the glass aside with his plate, pushed forward so he can lean on folded arms in its place, his head slouched between humped shoulders. "That's a concern of mine," he says frankly, dealing down to the business line, "but we can talk about it some other time. Not pressing, is the problem of Mr. Linden, not yet. I wanted to let you know that you'll be liaising with Bahir again for me this week. He and his brother are on the guest list for some upcoming parties featuring club patrons who have opinions about the MRA business."
"Sure, of course." Percy finishes the last of his wine also and sets his glass before him, letting manicured fingertips draw in an idle circle over its rim. "I'll arrange to see him after."
"Email's fine, too, if he has a secure connection. However you want to work it out." Shaw thins a smile in that trust in his pieces. "More information's always good, but I hope we can shift to a more proactive stage. Besides my making a blowhard idiot of myself on TV, that is."
"Right, besides that." Percy's eyes betray more amusement than his slight smile. He laces his fingers together, elevated over the table by the prop of his elbows. "Public reaction after that -- incident -- at the safehouse ... well." His lips thin to a grimace. "It will be /good/ to get more proactive."
Effort smooths away Shaw's disgruntled disgust for that event. "It's becoming easier to tie my bombast to our enemies, thanks to that reaction, but it galls. My God, it does gall, Percy. I wish we could live in a time where we could be ourselves, and the rest of the world just had to knuckle under to it." He shakes his head, though, and sits back slowly. "A pipe dream, especially for me. If you think of anything we can do on the active side, let me know."
"You would think," Percy starts, but the frustration is wearied out of him before the words are finished leaving his mouth, and he exhales softly and shakes his head, "--but you'd be wrong. I'll be sure to speak up."
"Good man," and Shaw taps his knuckles on the table for emphasis, crowned by a flash of smile. "Shall we wrap up, then? Busy day tomorrow for me, even if I'm not bending anybody over a desk to slake my animal desires."
Percy chokes off a laugh and rubs at one eye with his forefinger. "Uh," he says. "Yeah. Me too, I think. Busy, and long." He straightens, letting his hands fall away from the table, preparatory to rising.
"Sorry," Shaw says to the choke, sounding nothing like it, and pushes himself to his feet. "My turn for the check. See you down at the offices tomorrow. The Penfield account on conference call tomorrow at two, right?"
"Yeah. Two." There is a muttered curse on conference calls in general, followed by a smile whose sunshine is only slightly forced as Percy draws to his feet, brushing imaginary lint from his pale suit.
Slanted eyes mark that reaction, too, but Shaw doesn't comment -- looks rather sympathetic, in fact. "Two. See you then." He flicks a sign to a hovering waiter, who nods and goes to add the meal to his tab, and looks back at Percy, calm and collected, with bright black eyes. "Thank you for dinner," he finishes, and smiles, and waves his companion ahead of him to the door.
[Log ends.]
Hope the al-Razis come up with something tomorrow night. Hope we find a fresh direction for tackling this problem. (Is that what I'm looking for? Not personal itches to quiet, but political ones?) It might be good to let the noise over the safehouse attack die down a little more, but then, it might not be. The iron's still hot and ready for striking. We just need to be sure we're forging the metal, not cracking it.
I feel better. Glad we met. Should have done it sooner.
5/3/2006
Logfile from Shaw of X-Men MUCK.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The dinner hour in one of New York City's best old steakhouses, buzzingly busy with mostly white-collar clientele chowing down on thick slabs of meat and more hearty sides than they know what to do with. A booth in the back stands shielded by the ambient noise and the discreet ushering of servitors. With gentlemanly skill and patience, Shaw carves off a chunk of his porterhouse steak, swirls it through the potatoes' gravy drizzled alongside, and pops it into his mouth. After he's chewed and swallowed, he levels the fork at Percy across the table and urges, slicing off a smile to follow the bite, "Tell me this isn't better than having yet another boring damn meeting in my office."
"Oh ... I don't know." The words are as languid as the slow smile, dark lashes slipping low over amber's indolent gleam, just as leisurely as the jag of serrated blade through the meat of his pepper-crusted filet mignon. "Your girl there is decently hot." Percy pauses mid-slice to retrieve his glass, moistening his lips with wine over a partial smirk.
A startled blink pauses Shaw for a second's thought. Catching up with a skewed hook to his mouth, he shrugs and digs into more meat. "/That/ office. I couldn't immediately come up with any new attractive pawns in the clubhouse. But you mean . . . right." He chews slowly, eyes on his plate. They lift as he picks up his wineglass for a short swallow, and they look flat and empty in the warm lighting overhead. "Zoe McMillan has become a valuable asset to the company. It's good of you to notice."
The breath that escapes through Percy's nose is neither snort nor snicker, torn between aspirations of both. He sets down his glass and forks his sliver of steak into his mouth, rolling his eyes ceilingwards as he chews. "It is nice to get out and about," he allows, almost leaving dear Zoe alone. But then he wanders back there anyway. "Easy little thing. No self-respect. I had her in two minutes a few months ago and it wasn't like I was /trying/."
The wineglass goes back on the table; the utensils go back in Shaw's capable fists. He doesn't do anything with them right away, but asks in a polite and even tone, "So what would you say if she were involved with the boss?"
Percy's eyebrows climb, thin and dark over whiskeyed eyes that laugh and give the lie to his solemn mouth. "Were you /bored/?"
A frown's his answer, but Shaw's tone takes the edge off the expression: bemused, reflective. "Possibly. I would prefer that interpretation to what I'd come up with on my own." He shakes his head slightly and shifts his shoulders under the armor of his sleek chocolate-dark suit. "Care to put on your advisor's hat, Percy? Or -- maybe a friend's."
Percy shrugs back against the seat, shoulders rolling into an easy slouch that crinkles the smooth lines of his pale suit, moonlit grey. He twirls his fork in his fingers for something to occupy them, smile faint and wry as he spends the moment ignoring his food and paying attention to his companion. "Fire away."
"Thank you," Shaw murmurs, somewhere between ironic and automatic. A skirling breath of air following a passing waiter comes loaded with fresh food scents and layered, overlapping pheromones, including the prickly male mark of his own. He eats a bite of potatoes, then puts the utensils down and cups a hand around the wineglass's stem. Light casts blood through its contents onto his skin. "I think," he says almost casually, "that my death wish is trying to find fulfillment these days."
Percy's expression blanks, and then blends into skepticism with the furrow of his brow. He leans forward again, tipping his head slightly to one side. "How do you mean? From /McMillan/?"
"Oh, God, not really -- well." Shaw stops himself and shakes his head again. "It could be," he allows, toying with the glass, watching the shadow-fall of wine-light on his hand. His brows are knuckled over dark, dark eyes. "Undermining myself, just begging for a lawsuit . . . I got into a fight last week with one of Magneto's henchmen, Percy. How's that for walking on the wild side?"
Percy blinks. Then he lowers a contemplative glance to his plate, silent as he works his knife through several thin slices of steak. "A bit on the mad side." The tines of his fork dig deep into the pink-red flesh of medium rare meat; he jerks the fork up, pointing it at Shaw. "Restless?"
A tip of his free hand, accepting or equivocating. Shaw's hooded expression doesn't provide a guidepost to disambiguation. "I get that way every now and then," he answers. "But like this? Shit. Brawling with a wanted terrorist, sleeping with an employee -- I'm worried." He says it quietly, looking somewhere around Percy's second button from the top of his shirt. "I'd like you to -- I don't know, stop me if I really go off the deep end. That's your job."
Percy sits up a little straighter in his seat, the smile that ghosts over his lips bearing something of a sardonic edge. He doesn't speak until he has chewed, and swallowed, and aimed the tines of his fork at a diagonal in one curled fist, towards his plate. "Want me to hang about," he asks, just a little too lightly, voice dropping lower with the breath of surreptition as if it's even remotely necessary, "shut your drives down when you get too rowdy? I can do that, you know."
"No," Shaw says curtly, then draws in a breath. "Sorry. No, that won't be necessary. I'd sooner go down in flames than be castrated chemically -- no offense."
Percy bares his teeth in a grin that has very little to do with humor. "Right," he says, the syllable sketched with strange precision. "None taken."
"Right," Shaw throws back with some heat, though his jaw's clenched tight for control. "It's a kind offer, Percy, but not what I need. It isn't your particular gift that I want serving me, but your insight."
"At your service," Percy answers, turning the fork over in his fingers absent-mindedly. Bland solemnity shades to gilt cheer as he continues, "And for a start, I'll advise /not/ to throw punches at Magneto's minions in the future."
"No shit, Sherlock." The mutter gets drowned in a fast, hard swallow of wine, and Shaw thumps the glass back on the table as if it were a beer stein. Piqued, he stares at his Bishop with hot and pecking eyes: a raptor hunting clues like mice in the grass. "And don't fuck my admin assistant, either."
Percy shakes his head, mouth's quirk inching towards grimace; the slow sweep of long lashes indicates lazy unconcern. "I don't hit up one-night stands twice," he says. His fork slices into the side of his baked potato, the chunk's edges blurred with sour cream. He eats it, and then notes dryly, "Anyway I'm not really /fucking/ lately, so I wouldn't worry about it."
The hunting eyes narrow. "I meant me. If you want to have her, that's fine -- one way for me to slide out of this mess! -- but I meant /me/." Shaw pauses there, recoups with a return to eating. And a bland, testing tone: "I'm sorry to hear about it, though. Do you want to talk about it?"
Percy rubs his eyes with the middle finger and thumb of his left hand, letting fork fall idly over his plate as he makes a low-rumbled sound, partial grunt in the back of his throat. "Not especially. Sorry. My own bullshit, not important -- and never ask relationship advice from someone doped up on painkillers and dumb /anyway/," he adds, lifting head and hand both in admonition. "She wasn't bad or anything," he adds, tracking back onto Zenith, "but I can't see why you'd get /addicted/. What, uh," he waggles vague fingers, "how did /that/ start?"
An impatient sweep of Shaw's hand dismisses her (and nearly splatters gravy onto the tablecloth while he's at it). "Because I got bored. Restless, as you said. She was there, she was a mutant who didn't -- doesn't -- know that I am, too, and you know how I love to play that game, in private as much as in the media." He grimaces a self-mocking smile. "Simple amusement, huh? Harmless, as long as it doesn't end up in court."
"Nothing to worry about, right? If you stay careful." Percy sits back against the seat, food ignored for the moment as he traces the beginnings of shadow that ghost jaw with his knuckles. "You think she'll, ah -- slip the lead?"
"Maybe." Shaw chews on the idea like gristle. "Maybe. I'll try to cut her loose before it gets to that point . . . and this is a stupid thing to be talking about, isn't it?" The smile gets forced into more casual contours. "All over a silly slip of a girl, and a man my age, in my position."
"Just watch you don't go siring any bastards on your sister," Percy says, dryness a facetious drape over light words. "Never ends well." He shakes his head, sitting forward again to put fork to food as he speaks, solemnity layering over the words as his contemplative gaze focuses on meat and potato. "It's not stupid. As a concern, it's understandable. It might foul up. It could not."
A frozen beat of silence. "I had a sister once, actually," Shaw shares lightly, quite lightly. "Well, stillborn, but it still counts, right?"
Silence answers silence: blank, empty even of breathing. Oops. Percy blinks. And blinks again. "--Ah. Well. I was just -- going to this Camelot brought low over a girl -- place," he flounders after a moment.
"You didn't know," Shaw relents after a moment's bemused study of this flailing. "It was -- never mind. Just a comment, and not a well-timed one. I don't know why I said it. Speaking of family, though: how's your brother? I sent flowers. Don't know if he got them, but . . ."
"I'm sorry," Percy says, because this is actually what he should have said in the first place. And then: "He's got all manner of allergies," he says presently, briskly, latching onto safer ground. "Ashleigh has been taking care of the flowers and reading him all the cards. He's -- awake. Alive. Mumbling."
A blink. "Mumbling?"
"His speech -- he's not speaking that clearly yet," Percy explains, running the fingers of one hand through his hair. He retrieves his fork to prod at the remnant of his baked potato. "He's still slurring. Especially when they've got him on the drugs."
"Ah, of course." Shaw eyes his meal, then gives up on it in favor of nursing the last of his wine. "I've never been in the hospital, myself. Don't know how all that works -- but I'm glad he's doing better, and not just because I'm doing business with him." He spins that sentence into a jocular weave, weighted by his solemn stare. "You know what I mean."
Percy eyes Shaw for a moment. He is silent through a bite of steak, and then remarks with a certain innocuous blandness, "In his more lucid moments, he seems fairly inclined to sell."
The wineglass shivers briefly. Shaw steadies it against his lips for an equally bland swallow. "Oh? And marry Ashleigh and found a leper colony in Brazil, I suppose. Giving back to society."
"Fuck society," Percy chuckles through the words, lifting his own glass as he shakes his head. "He's never been cut out for this. He wants to go back to school." Informative and strangely flat, the words slip past his lips, curving into a wan little smile.
"Mmm. What do you think of that?"
"What right do I have to think?" The smile flashes broader, quicksilver and less than pleasant. "It isn't what my father wanted."
He gets a solemn, lip-pursed look. And Shaw wonders, "Would you stand to inherit?" And as quickly: "Would you want to?"
"The company? No. He can sell it. I don't believe William considered that a concern." Percy tips his head forward, frown plate-aimed. He adds, "And no. I wouldn't want to."
"I'm glad." Shaw passes it off coolly, as if the other man, his Bishop, had merely handed over the salt. "Too many divisions in your attention -- Christ, look at Linden. Tearing himself in half for me, and it'll be the death of him, just you watch."
"There are only so many balls one man can keep in the air," Percy agrees mildly. He forks the last of his steak to bring it to his mouth.
Nodding, Shaw finishes the last swallow of wine and sets the glass aside with his plate, pushed forward so he can lean on folded arms in its place, his head slouched between humped shoulders. "That's a concern of mine," he says frankly, dealing down to the business line, "but we can talk about it some other time. Not pressing, is the problem of Mr. Linden, not yet. I wanted to let you know that you'll be liaising with Bahir again for me this week. He and his brother are on the guest list for some upcoming parties featuring club patrons who have opinions about the MRA business."
"Sure, of course." Percy finishes the last of his wine also and sets his glass before him, letting manicured fingertips draw in an idle circle over its rim. "I'll arrange to see him after."
"Email's fine, too, if he has a secure connection. However you want to work it out." Shaw thins a smile in that trust in his pieces. "More information's always good, but I hope we can shift to a more proactive stage. Besides my making a blowhard idiot of myself on TV, that is."
"Right, besides that." Percy's eyes betray more amusement than his slight smile. He laces his fingers together, elevated over the table by the prop of his elbows. "Public reaction after that -- incident -- at the safehouse ... well." His lips thin to a grimace. "It will be /good/ to get more proactive."
Effort smooths away Shaw's disgruntled disgust for that event. "It's becoming easier to tie my bombast to our enemies, thanks to that reaction, but it galls. My God, it does gall, Percy. I wish we could live in a time where we could be ourselves, and the rest of the world just had to knuckle under to it." He shakes his head, though, and sits back slowly. "A pipe dream, especially for me. If you think of anything we can do on the active side, let me know."
"You would think," Percy starts, but the frustration is wearied out of him before the words are finished leaving his mouth, and he exhales softly and shakes his head, "--but you'd be wrong. I'll be sure to speak up."
"Good man," and Shaw taps his knuckles on the table for emphasis, crowned by a flash of smile. "Shall we wrap up, then? Busy day tomorrow for me, even if I'm not bending anybody over a desk to slake my animal desires."
Percy chokes off a laugh and rubs at one eye with his forefinger. "Uh," he says. "Yeah. Me too, I think. Busy, and long." He straightens, letting his hands fall away from the table, preparatory to rising.
"Sorry," Shaw says to the choke, sounding nothing like it, and pushes himself to his feet. "My turn for the check. See you down at the offices tomorrow. The Penfield account on conference call tomorrow at two, right?"
"Yeah. Two." There is a muttered curse on conference calls in general, followed by a smile whose sunshine is only slightly forced as Percy draws to his feet, brushing imaginary lint from his pale suit.
Slanted eyes mark that reaction, too, but Shaw doesn't comment -- looks rather sympathetic, in fact. "Two. See you then." He flicks a sign to a hovering waiter, who nods and goes to add the meal to his tab, and looks back at Percy, calm and collected, with bright black eyes. "Thank you for dinner," he finishes, and smiles, and waves his companion ahead of him to the door.
[Log ends.]