He's taking his punishment well. Good. Shouldn't be a problem going forward, and I won't treat him any differently. Give him that much dignity; he's earned it.
He worries about his brother. Well, of course he does, but I can (and will) reassure him only so far before it becomes a matter of trust: the final, the ultimate payment traded between our ranks. This matter will be resolved to our satisfaction. To mine, if it extends to affect the Circle itself.
Will it? Maybe. I can't afford worry over that possibility, so I don't. I plan, I hedge, I wait, and I keep what I do worry about to myself as much as I can. Not for Bahir al-Razi, Black Pawn, to know.
And so: that brother of his. That Queen of mine.
I know they'll be fine. She will, without a doubt, and Heaven have mercy on those who put her in this position because she surely won't. They'll never break her - who better to know that than I? And I do know it, I remind myself of it every time I think of the indignity (the outrage!) of the situation . . . but knowing is not doing, as the Black Pawn reminded me tonight.
I can't do anything about the government's investigation. I can't do anything about my private fears. At least, I can't do anything yet.
I hate that word. Always have.
6/2/2006
Logfile from Shaw of
X-Men MUCK.
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Hellfire Clubhouse - Library
The leaded-glass eyes of tall windows are nearly lost amid the taller bookcases that line all four walls of this secluded room. Heavy leather armchairs, dark burgundy and black, take advantage of the windows' light and view onto the grounds; delicate oaken end tables and antique brass lamps keep them company. Books are the focus here, however: modern volumes and folios older than the lamps, a collection spanning centuries and a rainbow of tastes, as befits the club's patrons.
--
Friday-night poker should not end in smashed crockery and whiskey-breathed shouts of who's got better blackmail on whom and like /hell/ you got dealt that fourth ace, you cock-eyed sonuvabitch. A flurry of servants descends to clean up the mess, including the fat-cat players themselves, while one player retreats from parlor to library behind a firmly closed door. And one servant, a little too sharp-eyed and muscular for her nominal station, hovers near the door, but with an eye on the one to the rest of the wing, obviously waiting for what will come in through the stream of broken plates and dishes (and fat cats) going out.
What comes through is Bahir, sidestepping the flow with a deferential air -- All affected, of course, about as natural as the White Queen's breasts. -- that puts him out of mind when coupled with the light breath of telepathic suggestion. He waits, and as the area clears, steps forward as silent announcement of his presence. He turns his hands outward, palms lifting, in some slight gesture of something or another. Shoes and trousers are black; his shirt is stark white, tucked in rather sloppily with tails trailing.
The servant gives him a quick once-over, crown to heels, and nods sharply. << Him, it's him, let the boss know-- >> Without a word, she opens the library door and then slips out after her cohort. As that door shuts, Shaw's voice comes through the open one: "Bahir? Oh, thank God." With a fuzzy grey ripple of mood: pique, relief, anticipation, anger. "Come in, please. We're alone. Finally, sounds like."
Bahir enters, quick as his summons, with his hands folded behind his back. He inclines his head to Shaw. He looks tired, and he shifts: small, nervous gestures, as weight rocks from foot to foot and fingers twitch straight cuffs and push back his hair. He says, "Sir," with only the slightest trace of irony.
Shaw is standing, too, at one of the windows between the bookcases, looking out at the rain slicking a shimmery veil on the glass between this quiet room and that grey city. The pawn's entrance gets him to glance away from such a dreary view, however, and with a thin, tired smile that dresses his navy suit and apple-green shirt down towards casualness. Unclasping his hands from behind his back, he waves Bahir toward one of the two armchairs near the window. "You wouldn't believe how long it took me," he remarks over his mood's continuing grumble, "to get that argument hot enough to boil over. But now no one will remember your visit, if they even noticed you. And they'll be leaving /me/ alone because who wants to get me shouting again?"
"Aren't you clever," Bahir simpers with patent insincerity. He crosses to the chair indicated and sits down on the edge of the seat. His moves with a slight stiffness, and the sleeve of his shirt is rolled back past the cast on his arm, but otherwise he seems quite recovered. "What'd you do? Insult their mothers?"
"Their stock portfolios and their mistresses," Shaw answers, but automatically, without interest visible or empathic. He sits, too, and arranges his arms on the chair's rest with a devotion of attention that nearly disguises his flicker-swift absorption of Bahir's body language. "Works every time, and the fireworks are always worth the mess." << Especially with, >> but the thought trails into fuzz and fret and fume: a ground state of grar. He shakes his head slightly. "Anyway, thank you for coming. Percy passed along your information."
Bahir tips his hand. "Of course." The tip slides away, damp palm scuffed over the arm of his chair as he studies his nails. "Is there-- What--." He tries, twice, to form a sentence and both times breaks off. He smiles at Shaw, a tight, unhappy expression. "They can't really keep them, can they?"
The anger surges; Shaw bites down on it hard enough to raise the muscles from jaws to neck. "No," he says in heavy emphasis, eyes pinned on Bahir's. His fingers dig into the chair's upholstery, and he leans forward. "They won't be kept. They won't be harmed. They won't have a /hair/ on their /heads/ touched, or else you'll see a media circus that'll make the Simpson trial look like coverage of the annual raspberry-picking festival in Buttfuck, Maine." He simmers a slowly exhaled breath. "Your brother," he says more temperately, "will be fine. I promise it."
Gaze fixed to Shaw's, Bahir draws greedy reassurance from his determination. He looks away, glance flickering slowly over toward the window. Lips thin and turn on a slight grimace that twists into a curving hook of a smile. "They are not happy with him, there. He has not had the nicest stay thus far -- but nothing too awful." Fingers twitch, forming a fist and then releasing: his body whispers 'yet,' in a nervous betrayal. "What can I do for you? Is there anything else you need to know?"
"Is he memorizing faces and names?" Shaw asks quietly. The anger tamps down under cold business, colder breath of revenge: << We'll know, and we'll act if we need to, and they'll never know it was us, but they will know the pain, the punishment, /don't mess with us/, all the way up to the top of the government if need be. >>
"Yes," Bahir breathes softly, syllable hissing to Shaw's ears. "Although without his telepathy, it would just be faces. Few care to share their names. They are -- wary. He unwisely took out two of their men when they were arresting Emma." He spreads his hands with a glimmer of dark humor. "No one likes telepaths. What can I /do/, Shaw? Can I do anything? I hate this sitting and waiting when my brother -- he is well beyond my reach."
<< And ours. >> Shaw grimaces over that thought, leaked on acid's mental reflux. He shifts his attention away to the request, to the young man making it, and that snaps his cold focus back into place. "I trust our security," he says in pensively slow answer. "Harper runs a tight ship, and I have technology in these walls that the government's never even heard of, thanks to my R&D tanks. But . . . they might be trying to infiltrate the servants. The pawns. The gardeners, for all I know." He rubs a hand down his face, blurring away a flash of haggard doubt. "If they have Emma and they have Adel, God, they could be coming after /us/. You could help me find out."
Bahir looks unhappy with Shaw's request, and he stirs irritably, but he nods in agreement. "Fine. Listen and listen, then?"
Shaw's mood lashes out at the unhappiness, but he bites it down into more polite chunks: "I'm open to other suggestions, of course."
"I don't have any," Bahir says, shrugging. He is bland, bland in expression and tone: "I will do as you request."
"Happily," Shaw smears at him, brows raised and fingers tense again in chair fabric. "I can tell, but -- no. It doesn't matter." He forces relaxation, even glances out the window for a mindless second or five. To the glass, then, he continues, "This doesn't have to go beyond what the Feds already have, or think they have. If it touches on the Circle, even on the Hellfire Club, it will be war of some sort or other." Bloody thoughts, hungry thoughts, taloned and toothed. Sloe eyes slow back to the pawn, and he finishes with neat formality, "I accept your service, gratefully. You are helping all of us and thus yourself as well."
Bahir cuts a smile for Shaw, just to show how very happy he is. "Sir," he says, economic to the extreme with acknowledging words.
Shaw sits in that acceptance for another few seconds. His surface thoughts roil with impatience/regret over this pawn, this brand of service, before he closes his eyes and makes them calm. "Look," he says then, opening his eyes and sinking back in the chair. His manner is allover serious and calm (seriously calm, too). "You /are/ helping me, Bahir, and that will help your brother in the end, so he doesn't end up where he is again. You aren't doing busywork. You aren't being shuffled out of the way. This matters." He frowns; the regret plucks a stronger chord. "Am I getting through?"
"I want my brother back," Bahir says in a low voice, longing and fear making tone thick and rough. "I trust you--" The uneasy shift of body language adds a silent 'more or less'. "--to do what you can to get him back to me. I just wish I were doing something more tangible." Fingers close to a fist, holding absolutely nothing in its grasp. "Surely you understand /that/."
With a barked laugh bearing as much pain as amusement, Shaw retorts, "Me? Of all people? Christ, Bahir, of course I do. If I could have fought my way to saving them, to springing them even now! --I would." His mind shares ghostly cinematic fantasies of exactly that: superhero Black King to the rescue. "But I /can't/. We can't. Any action might bring us to the Feds' attention, and if they aren't already looking this way, I don't want them to start." He sits forward abruptly and rubs both hands over his face and up into his hair, loosening its already loose ponytail. "I want my Queen back," he says very quietly. "I want it all back the way it was, and I can't do one fucking thing except wait at this point. /Yes/, I understand."
Fingers open again and Bahir sighs. "I know. Restraint, right? That's my lesson? Yet again," he says, eyes flicking upward on a slight, tight smile. "I get it. I trust you to place me where most useful. I do," he repeats, firm. He meets Shaw's eyes, ever so trusting and trustworthy. "That doesn't mean I will be happy with it."
"My lesson, too," Shaw mutters, shifting his eyes to the empty wet grey beyond the window. He sits up again, brushes back the wisping hair, nods shallowly. After a sighed look up at the ceiling, he drops back to the conversation. "Happiness. Yes." A flat smile. "We have a punching bag in the gym. And if you do catch any snoops or spies . . ." He deliberately projects remembered photographs: a man's battered, bloodied body in some dark alleyway.
Bahir tries not to let smug satisfaction taint his expression at the memory of another man's agony -- but he doesn't try very hard, and it is a wasted effort anyway. He smirks. "My physical activities are limited for another week or two yet, but after that, I will see about that punching bag you mentioned. -- Say," he says with soft sarcasm. "This place doesn't have a pool, does it?"
Smugness from the Black King, too, squared: that delightful Dorian memory, then Bahir's evident satisfaction. "Glad you approve," he murmurs. "--No, no pool. The sauna is as good as it gets as far as watersports in the house. Do you belong to a gym with one?"
"I do," Bahir says back, a hint coy as he bites back his smile. "I /do/ approve." He brushes the topic of gyms away: "Yes. It has a few branches, mostly close to the major colleges." He looks down at his arm, fingers curling in to touch the cast. "Can't swim yet, either. Sitting around and sweating is not, in any way, sports."
Shaw evinces professional interest in this topic. "Any problem with the bills? Or the doctors?" His focused mind wavers there: /doctors/. Blood-sucking, invasive, impudent . . .
Bahir lifts his chin sharply. "Nothing beyond handling, no."
"Good. At least that's working right." Shaw bends his mouth to carry the weight of his cynicism. He eyes the sharpness of Bahir's response (curiosity, sweeping away the medical mistrust--), then rests more comfortably in the chair's overstuffed depths, his leg crossing at ankle over the other's knee. A nonchalant nip back to earlier: "Didn't think you went in for sports. I'll have to invite you to my next Super Bowl party."
"I don't watch," Bahir says with the slightest hint of disdain. "I compete. Adel competes--" A fractionalized hesitation over tense, as present slips from his mouth too late to recall and replace with past. "--as well," he finishes lamely.
An emotional frisson disturbs Shaw's mental surface; a split-second later, he allows it to rise to his face in concern and regret. "That never should have happened," he says bluntly. "Your brother's injuries . . . /Damn/ that boy." << Killed him while I had the chance, >> his thoughts lament loudly, tangled with paternal hate and combatant respect. "I'm glad Emma did what she did to him. It wasn't tangible, but it was something."
Bahir shakes his head minutely, all traces of humor removed from his features. He signals his unwillingness to further treat the subject with silence. He breaks it on a tangent: "Dorian isn't Brotherhood. Also, he seems to think that the telepath is a woman who had been there the first time, black with white hair. I think we are done with him."
Shaw accedes to the switch with a nod (and only a little internal grumbling) and the pleased supposition of, "An assignment executed the way it was planned. Thank God for small favors. He's out with the trash, then. Don't think he'll be stepping in on any mutant quarrels, huh? Or stepping at all for a while, I'd say."
"If he wheels in on any mutant quarrels, that is his business," Bahir says with chill unconcern. "So long as they aren't our quarrels. He seems rather unstable, but, again, he believes the telepath is someone else entirely. He seemed fixated from what little I heard. Which is nice."
"Fixated?" Shaw repeats with bland lack of suspicion behind it. "Imagine that. Poor guy." He checks the window (darkening, nightfall, rainfall easing) and then climbs to his feet. "Well, that should do it for now. You'll be the first to know when they're out, of course." He pauses, looks down at his pawn, considers quickly. "Come around here on your normal schedule, as if Emma were giving you lessons still. Routine's good for anyone watching. And just -- listen, yes, and let us know if you find anything. I don't expect it, but it can't hurt."
Standing as Shaw does, if with more care, Bahir nods. "I can do that. Continue the tasks with Harper?"
Moving for the door, which he catches and holds open, Shaw nods back. "Please." He leans into the stiff-armed hand around the door and gives him a level, quiet sort of look. "It's going well, Bahir. Keep up the good work."
Bahir meets Shaw's look with a certain suspicious wariness. He nods, once, and then makes to leave. "Enjoy your evening," he says in mild parting.
Shaw stretches a thin smile and a thinner thought behind it: << Trust me -- and be /happy/, Mr. al-Razi. >> Mildly aloud, he returns, "You, too. Good night." The door closes on the library, and he leaves Bahir to find his own way out while /he/ vanishes into private areas and private concerns, held close in a mind only marginally settled from the business closed between monarch and pawn.
[Log ends.]