(no subject)
The elegant blue sleeves of his dress shirt rolled back nearly to his elbows, Erik is at work against the black-tiled counter in the kitchen, bony hips and black slacks rested lazily forward into the surface itself as he focuses hard upon pasting creamy peanut butter onto white bread. He is having something of a difficult time about it, which could be due to the half-empty glass of whiskey at his elbow, and the half empty /bottle/ of whiskey beyond that. Elsewhere in the kitchen, Achilles is walking in slow, muddled circles, big tongue flopping out and up after the smudge of peanut butter dolloped deliberately onto the blunt of his snout.
It is on quiet steps that Ellen emerges from her erstwhile hiding place, clean and fresh and crisply dressed after her habitual formality in pale blue and darker grey. She has accumulated a small store of clothing to replace some that she lost in the transition. She stands blinking in the light at the entry to the kitchen, her gaze following the dog with vague abstraction.
Achilles is distracted. Occasionally his tongue flops up enough to get a taste of peanut butter, and slowly, he's getting the idea. More of the substance is displaced with each successive lap, and his circling stutters a bit once he has the rhythm down. Meanwhile, Erik continues to push an excessive amount of the stuff onto his one piece of bread. He either hasn't thought to get jelly out yet, or he's misplaced it. "Hello."
Ellen shifts her weight from the firm plant of both feet, such that she is favoring one over the other, and rubs at her left arm with her right hand, her expression touched with a mild from as she lifts her eyes from Achilles to Erik to study him instead. She says, "Hello."
"I am making a sandwich," Erik explains after a short silence, the back of his knife-wielding hand lifting enough to rub at his brow before he drops the tool onto his plate in order to reach for his glass.
Ellen pads a few steps into the kitchen, with a nod. She makes note of peanut butter and bread and knife; she makes note of Erik's glass. Her frown deepens. She lifts a hand to tuck a stray lock of her hair behind her ear. "So you are."
Ignorant of her frown or not, Erik does not seem put off by it. No more than he is put off by Achilles grinning up at his side in hopes of getting more peanut butter. He swallows a fair portion of what remains in his squat glass and replaces it a bit fumblingly. "I require jelly."
Ellen quietly manuevers around the dog's hind portion to open the refrigerator and peer into it. Discovering the jelly jar in the door, she pulls it out and balances it on the flat of her hand, with the other pressed over its lid. Holding it between them, she closes the refrigerator with her shoulder and turns back towards him, proffering it.
"Thank you," mutters Erik in return, not quite as willing to enunciate as he was before now that he's actually endeavored to make brief and slightly ashamed eye contact. But, the jelly. With little concern for physics, or for contamination, he unscrews the lid with a flick of his wrist and proceeds to poke his knife down into the purpleish substance.
With her hands folded neatly behind her back upon the delivery of the jar, Ellen cants her head slightly to one side to watch his progress with knife and purpley goo as though it is of solemn interest. If there is acknowledgment of thanks, it comes only in a dip of Ellen's head. She is as quiet as a pale-eyed gargoyle, if slightly more mobile.
Knives were not crafted with scooping jelly in mind. After a few hopeless prods, he begins to work out that if he...sort of...tilts the jar, he can sort've...coax globs of it out onto the other slice of bread. Pat. Pat. Achilles wags his tail, still hopeful.
"I think your dog is hungry, sir," Ellen observes mildly, watching the globular splat of the jelly onto the bread. She frowns again, and chews on her lower lip.
"He is always hungry," says Erik, again at a mutter while one last plop of jelly slides out onto bread. The jar is thumped aside, knife still jostling against its interior. "He is a dog. You seem unhappy."
Ellen lifts her head slightly, surprise widening her eyes. Her gaze skips away to fix upon an unspecified point in the middle distance, and then flicks back towards him again. "Are you happy?"
"Not really." The jellied half of the bread is turned over onto the peanut buttered half, and Erik shifts his hands to grip the lip of the counter on either side of him while he peers down at the fruit of his inebriated efforts.
Ellen inclines her head to that and looks down at Achilles for a moment as though the mastiff potentially holds the answer. Then she looks back up at Erik and his sandwich. "I did not really expect to be," she says. She takes a step back and lets her hands clasp before her rather than behind, tipping her head up and watching him.
Scruffy chin tucked and jaw flexed hollow, Erik continues to squint at his sandwich for several seconds more before he straightens and reaches back for his bottle. The better to refill his glass. "Neither did I. But things could be worse."
Ellen watches the spill of liquid into the glass in silence. "I imagine so," she says after a moment. "We were given the choice, to leave or stay. I almost could not make it."
"Yes, well. I've been not making the decision for months, so I can hardly fault you for having doubts." A faint slur finds its way into words that are otherwise carefully spaced, and Erik blinks hard before tilting the bottle back upright. "I am hoping that...in time, I will be faced with more decisions that have the potential for a positive outcome."
Pressing her palms together, Ellen casts her gaze down at the floor and frowns a little harder. "Then I share that hope," she says. "Mystique was angry when I chose to leave. I do not think she expected it of me."
"I don't think...she has been paying a tremendous amount of attention. Regarding expectations." Despite having a freshly poured glass, Erik doesn't drink from it, batting it lazily over the counter with the back of his knuckles instead.
To that Ellen says nothing. She turns away and crouches on the floor, running her hands in a firm paired stroke down and over Achilles's neck and back.
Clank. The glass skips over grout. Clank. It skips back. "I am glad that you came."
"Thank you, sir." Ellen's reply is quiet, but when she looks up at him her smile is there: a fleeting instant of dry warmth. "I did have nowhere else to go."
"The Hellfire Club has fortunately been generous. Thus far." Finally, he lifts his glass and takes a slow sip that elevates less slowly into a lengthy swallow.
"Their telepaths watched me at my work," Ellen says, canting her head to one side as she puzzles over the dog. She slides slowly to her feet again, wiping her hands on her slacks as she goes. Then she lifts one to draw her thumb over the curve of her naked ear. "That was interesting. I never thought anyone would see."
Magneto's ear, likewise naked, goes untouched while he clears his throat and swirls the remnants of his latest glass. "It's odd, being surrounded by so many of them. It is difficult...to trust."
"I am not used to being vulnerable." Ellen's smile ghosts over her mouth again, this time a sourer, twisting thing. She curls a hand into a fist and then opens it, fingers splayed before her. "It is one thing to know that I hold death in my hand to bestow where I will, and another to think that it could be taken from me. Not the gift itself, but the impetus."
"Yes," agrees Erik, who blinks, muddled, and evidentally did not manage to follow what she's just said with any real measure of success. He sips again to keep from having to talk, and rocks half a step nearer.
"I wonder if I /could/ kill one," Ellen muses dreamily, from some other world. "Perhaps if they were asleep."
Any further progress in Ellen's direction is stayed there. Erik chooses this time to recall that he has a sandwich, and tugs the plate back over before him, booze still in hand. "Perhaps."
Ellen looks at him with an expression of quiet consideration and folds her hands before her again.
There is peanut butter squished out of the sides. Ignorant of Ellen's observation, Erik prods a finger after it, and then into the side of his mouth.
Ellen makes a helpful observation: "That is possibly enough filling for two distinct sandwiches."
Teeth clipping in under the blunt of his nail, Erik swallows before brushing his hand lazily over the front of his shirt and glancing aside at Ellen from the sandwich in question. "I was hungry."
"That much is evident." Ellen inclines her head again, and then sighs and glances away. "I felt -- too quiet. I have grown accustomed to living in company."
Erik flattens his hand over the white of the sandwich, further squeezing its contents out of the sides. There is rather a lot of it. "As have I."
"I spent most of my life alone," Ellen says, shaking her head as though to dispel some strange mist. She watches him squish upon his sandwich with a flicker of a grimace to her expression, but for some reason elects not to tell Magneto that he has made a mess.
"I am a social person," says Erik brilliantly upon polishing off his whiskey, "sometimes. And sometimes I am not. Moreso lately, though...not intentionally, really. I have become very dependent. It is somewhat pathetic, I think. I am Magneto." The square of his hand presses still further. Only then (and once he's allowed the worst of the excess to drop off) does he lift it to take a bite.
"I was never social," Ellen says very seriously. "I lived alone and kept cats. But then I suppose I ... became accustomed to having a sort of family."
Magneto chortles to himself around his bite of sandwich. Probably about the idea of Ellen as a crazy cat lady. Whatever the prompt for his amusement, he doesn't share it. He is quick to regain his composure at least, and he chews and swallows very seriously before speaking again. "Being alone is easier."
"In some ways." Ellen offers an odd little smile with the cant of her head, slightly puzzled, but not pursuant. "But I think even so I would rather the difficulty. I never felt more lost than I did when I left."
"It is better, I think. The community. But life has always been simpler without the temptations and pressures that accompany it." One bite taken and consumed, Erik drops his sandwich back onto its plate.
"Temptations," Ellen repeats, in a wondering sort of tone. "Pressures. I was afraid that I was going to kill them."
"That would be unfortunate," replies Erik, who examines his empty glass with indifference.
Ellen looks at him sharply, and then nods once. "Yes, sir," she says.
"You could just call me Erik, you know." This delivered on a delay, Erik shifts his weight back aside into the counter when his balance threatens to waver. "Nobody will hear."
"Names are important," Ellen says. She runs a hand through the loose fall of her hair and then looks up at him again, swallowing. "I do not like to use them frivolously."
Magneto watches her for a moment, grey-blue eyes dulled by the whiskey swimming around in his bloodstream, but he doesn't argue, merely blinking again before he sets his glass down square in the center of his sandwich. It is a sculpture. Or something. "Alright."
Ellen waits a moment longer, although for what is not clear, and then she laces her fingers together before her and tips her head up again. "I suppose I am going to go and read for a little while," she says. "I hope you will have some water before you retire tonight."
"I will try to remember," says Erik, who won't. Achilles pads back in from the direction of the living area, and Erik glances to the big dog, and then to Ellen again. "Goodnight."
"Good night," Ellen says. Then she turns and drifts back out of the kitchen, her hand falling light over the dog's back in passing.
Erik gets drunk and eats peanut butter. Ellen watches.