OOC - Five Years Commentary
Log: Five Years
Date: 9/11/06
Players: Emma & Rossi
It is five years after September 11th. It's funny to think this, but when I was growing up I always heard that people of my mother's generation always remembered where they were when they heard JFK was shot. The generation before that had Pearl Harbor. It's one of those things that I always took as an aphorism, a cliche that everybody talked about but nobody really did. I have problems remembering what I ate for breakfast this morning; be able to remember back 20-odd years to a specific moment in time seemed like an impossibility, a piece of nostalgic fiction.
On September 11, 2001, I was living in my apartment in Redwood City. My roommate pulled me out of bed to drag me to the living room, and I watched the twin towers fall on my 32-inch television. I was wearing blue flannel pajamas with Tweety bird on them. Apparently, you live and you learn. September 11, 2006.
Five years. Six hours. Twelve minutes.
Forty-six seconds.
The streets of the Financial District are populated, but it is the detritus of mordant holiday that fills the sidewalks, civilians in groups of somber black, of patriotic red, white and blue. Business suits -- the norm, on any other day -- are subdued and scattered through the thin crowds; few take to the streets on such a day, where memorials begin the morning, and services end them. The Secret Service has no sense of humor. New York City, today, has forgotten it.
Most of the uniforms have gone into hiding, shuttled from place to place as badges of honor for the remembering. The set of dress blues ambling down the sidewalk is an island to himself, the flat-topped cap precise under an arm, the hands stripped of the gloves that peep from a pocket. The breeze tugs at Rossi's hair, and touches on the flush of skin. It is a beautiful day.
It is always a beautiful day.
Emma did a commentary for me on this log, so this is my answer to it -- a little belated, yes, but it's like cheese, isn't it? Age only improves it. The set is long, but I was in a maudlin mood, which was due as much to Rossi's mood as my own. I like it, insofar as my sets go. Of late, I've shifted to a more ... conversational style of set, I suppose I should say, mid-scene and less scene-setting as scene mood-setting. There's an important distinction there which, in the reading of the above, I realize is sort of crap because once upon a time I was able to set both mood /and/ scene. Of course, it came at the cost of the world's longest set.
I like the breaking out of the first three lines, the dramatic effect: from great to small, from the emotional resonance of the first line -- September 11 -- to the triviality of the last. (Forty-six seconds.) I spelled out the words, I seem to remember, because numbers are academic and clinical and cold, and a countdown, and the time I wanted was /words/, with all the weight of the syllables and the sounds. I wanted to force the reader to sound them out in their head, rather than simply glance and comprehend.
I do this rather often with numbers. There's something more ... I don't know. Trite? about the numeral, except for that one: 11. Nobody who is reading this now could possibly avoid sounding out the entirety of that phrase. 'September 11.' It's one phrase that will always more impact in the numeral than in the spelling out.
I was in New York City for one of these anniversaries, though not for this one. New Yorkers are a tough lot, and business goes on even through the state and city memorials that go on during that day. The effects of 9/11 continue through the course of daily life, anyway, to an extent that I remember astonished me when I was there. "She lost her husband and her cousin in the towers," my friend told me about a woman he introduced to me while I was in Brooklyn. "They were FDNY." He threw it out there, not casually, but as though it were a matter of course, and I remember that to me it seemed like a huge deal, whereas for them, it was -- well, not a lesser deal, but rather something that they'd grown familiar with, so that it was less of a burden and more of a fact of life.
Coming from California, 9/11 seems like this /thing/, this stoppage in time where everything froze and there was a before, and there was an after, but they were two completely separate things. For a native who lived through it, 9/11 seems to be this thing that simply continued, until it became one of those things that you push into the back of your mind and carry on regardless, like the neighbor who plays polka music in the mornings and the third laundry machine from the left that only does cold.
Sorry. I meander. Back to the pose.
As I say, I liked this set. I like Rossi in dress uniform, walking his way back to the house (a la the station) because he needs to be alone for a while just to be himself, and a taxi cab would be too fast, and riding in a car with the others, he'd have to be the cop. 9/11 is an emotionally fraught day for him, as it is for a lot of people, and he makes an island of himself, an empty shell of a body -- a very handsomely attired body, because the NYPD blues are hot, yo -- moving of its own volition down the street. How his walking down the street in public in uniform means he doesn't have to be the cop is a little hard to explain; the best way to put it is that the uniform the water around his island. He can go through the motions, but there's nothing vested in it. His body carries on, his mind is elsewhere.
Like many of his colleagues, he lives with one foot always planted in that day. Thus, it is a beautiful day. (Today.) It is always a beautiful day. (9/11.) Somewhere it lives on in history, never ending, suspended in memory. There was an awesome show for a while called Third Watch, and they did an episode called September Tenth that ... I think won Emmys, actually, but what they kept reiterating, and what the interviewed cops and firemen on the show said, was that it was a beautiful day. A perfectly beautiful day. A gorgeous day, and then the towers fell. For those of you who haven't seen this show, I highly recommend it. Even if it's just for that one episode. One of the actresses in the show, her husband actually was in the FDNY and was called out to the towers. No show out there did 9/11 better.
For those who lived, and live still. Down this street, cars nudge aside bicyclists and pedestrians, hardly making better time than those on foot. A sleek, long car, hovering between the labels of luxury and limo, glides along with the rest of humanity, shielding it occupants from the press of the plebes. Inside, Emma drops paperwork to her lap and leans forward to peer out of the window, eyes slipping back across faces and forms to settle on the ambling blues. She smiles, and a moment later, the car edges into a firezone along the sidewalk.
The officer ambles on, pale gaze drifting across the car sliding in ahead of him. His jaw moves, miming the presence of gum that is absent in reality. He has a beat cop's lazy stride, the loose swing of leg that eats up ground without haste or waste. Three, four, five strides bring him to the car's rear; another three bring him to the driver's side. He pauses. Knuckles rap. "Yo," he says, desultory with warning. "You can't park here, buddy. Move it along."
Going through the motions, I said. And there's one. It's a trivial thing, to ask a car to move along: part of the cop persona, not really requiring anything of real intelligence. If he were thinking, he probably would've just let it go and moved on, but he's operating on auto-pilot, and auto-pilot marks it as a ticketable offence. So.
Hi, Emma.
She smiles when she sees him, which -- I never know with Emma. Is there real pleasure in seeing him? Or is it the prospect of toying with him a little again that makes her smile? I'd like to think it's the former, at least partially, though I can't imagine why she'd find pleasure in his company, unless it's the memory of the times they /had/ when she was Amber. He certainly hasn't been sweetness and light with her since. And then there's the knowledge that she has of him, the actual person. I'm biased, personally, but in a lot of ways, Chris really is likeable. He's an asshole, yes, and he can be beyond a dick, but he's also fundamentally a really good man, with a surprising amount of charm.
The near rear window lowers with a whisper while the far rear door opens. A harried looking little mouse of a woman pops out of the side and fumbles with pads of paper and pens and phones and such, while a slim arm, covered in a pearl-grey jacket sleeve, unfolds out of the window. "We'll move along momentarily, officer," Emma murmurs, just loud enough to carry to Rossi's ears.
The detective jerks, recognition aborting the immediate retort; attention, split from driver to disembarking passenger, turns to that pale arm. "You," Rossi says without inflection, Brooklyn's accent skinned and scalped for the word. His mouth closes over an epithet, then opens again for a sardonic: "Should've remembered this is your hunting ground."
Emma mentions in her commentary that she thinks Emma enjoyed being Amber, the girl that Rossi thought that he was seeing for a while. She had the liberty to be herself, without the persona, without the armor, without the lies -- which means that in a way, Rossi has seen Emma in a way that maybe very few (nobody?) has ever really seen. Barring the big lie, that is. Is it possible to be yourself when the entire basis of your identity is a lie? As a result, Rossi's maybe one of the few people who she can be herself with, though ... she often isn't, regardless.
The corollary to that is that of all the people out there today, there is one person who Rossi does not /have/ to be someone else for. That this one person is the person who violated and raped his mind is one of those ironic twists of fate. Of all the people that he should run into today, she is probably the most ... restful? Or at least -- the most honest. In this, he operates from a slightly misguided assumption that she has seen him, the entirety of him (mentally, though physically certainly enters the equation) and so he has nothing left to hide from her. Again, Emma's one of the few people that he can be himself with, though ... again, he often isn't, regardless.
It's a fact that his first reaction on seeing Emma as herself is almost always a quick jerk of fear, which hasn't been muted significantly by ongoing contact; their encounters are rare enough that there's always that first twitch of heartbeat quickening, chest squeezing before he can get it under control. I didn't pose to the empathic response there, but I did in the vocal quality: the emotional reaction was better controlled this time because it came from further away. That is to say, the distraction and the shell he built up around himself to guard against strong emotion serves him in good stead here.
This was back when I was doing good posing. I seem to do better in RP when I'm playing with Emma's player: she's one of a very very small handful of people who seem to bring out the best in me. Or at least, the best I'm capable of at any given moment. As a result of the kind of history he has with her, Chris is always far more raw in those scenes than he is in others. The description of his voice does a better job of conveying his state of mind in her vicinity than any real physical reaction could offer. There are times when his accent slips away, leaving him utterly exposed. It's odd, that. His accent is very much a part of his persona, and in times of emotional stress it can get thicker -- but at the same time, it can also disappear altogether. When it isn't deliberate, it's a sign that he's been peeled away to bone.
It doesn't happen very often.
It's a funny thing. Chris actually acknowledges Emma as a predator; he's a predator himself, so there's a sympathetic -- worldview? No, maybe the world is world-/bent/ -- that they share. The callout to the hunting grounds is recognition of that. Of course, in the battle of the predators, Emma trumps Chris. That doesn't prevent alpha male baring of teeth, however.
I like the description of the poor woman who gets booted out of the car for Chris. Emma assumes an awful lot, doesn't she? I especially love the description of her arm unfolding out of the window. There's an aura of film noir in it, which in a lot of ways epitomizes Emma: she's the femme fatale who strolls into the private eye's office and eventually ends up almost getting him killed. You know the kind. "He needed one hand for the money, one hand for the gun, and two hands for Frost. He wasn't good enough for all three." "Frost's body was a loaded weapon, and she knew how to pull the trigger." You know. that sort of thing.
"I only hunt in the boardrooms here, Detective." The other backseat passenger transfers to the front seat with a resentful glance at the officer, and the arm out the window beckons. "If I give you a promise of safe passage, would you like a lift?"
"How good's your word?" Rossi asks, holding fast to his place in neither retreat nor advance. The jaw works again; the fictional gum works across his tongue, is pressed into the pocket of his cheek, and then is utterly forgotten. Hooded eyes are wary. Watchful. "I'm headed back to the station."
Rhetorical question. No answer that Emma would give Rossi would be convincing, to be honest -- so why does he ask it? It's sort of a stalling tactic while he makes up his mind. He's tempted, to be honest, but he's also got that small itch of curiosity that gets him into trouble time and time again. What will happen? what would happen? And he's curious about her answer; she can, if she wants, /make/ him sit and join her. Will she? And if not, why not? Emma knows Rossi so much better than he knows her, or ... so he tells himself, anyway, though the reality is (maybe?) that they're on fairly even footing in that regard. He doesn't realize it, which is understandable. And like any man who has a scab to pick at, he wants to pick. He's driven to pick. Trying to understand Emma is like ignoring the pain and peeling away the old blood to find the fresh skin underneath. There's a morbid fascination, and -- I'm sorry to say -- a testosterone issue: I have faced my fear! See me roar!
Well, maybe not to that extent. But there's certainly a component of that there. It's curiosity that keeps him standing there, when prudence would (and does) tell him to move on. For all he complains about powerful mutants toying with him, he shares the same instincts that makes them do it. It's a two-way street, to some extent; if he didn't engage them, they wouldn't come. But he can't keep from engaging them because he's driven to know why why why, among other things, so they keep coming back, and round and round we go--
"About as good as anyone's, I suppose. At least you already think the worst of me. How much faith do you have to lose?" Emma teases, withdrawing her arm and scooting back from the door. "It's /just/ to the station, darling."
Det. Rossi's mouth twists, slanting towards a humor that is only a pale shadow of itself; the mind, reflected in cobalt behind, shares nothing of that leavening. "Not a lot of distance between a living room and a bedroom closet," he points out. "A shitload happened anyway, didn't it?"
I forget if this is actually the first time Chris has run into Emma since the whole accidental erasure of 15 years of his life. (There's something about Emma that makes him lose his mind.) (Mine too.) For those who are not in the know, Emma was sleeping with Chris as a ... uh, a side hobby, I guess you could say. She was pretending to be someone else. Well, I mentioned that above. At some point, though, she realized that Chris had recovered his memories and -- there was some other stuff that I don't remember all that clearly. Regardless, she had decided to do something fairly final about it: what, I don't know. He coaxed her back to his place; she agreed for one last fling, nostalgia's sake possibly, or actual affection -- who knows? Does she? -- and then Erik Lensherr showed up.
He (Magneto) was pissed at her (Frost) and moved to kill her. She completely overreacted. Chris lost 15 years of his memory in the backwash; Erik lost closer to 30, and a good time was had by all.
It was hard for Chris. Hard enough that he was wiped to begin with, back in the Windex episode; harder still to know that he was duped by the same woman who had erased him, for whatever reason of her own. Not only duped, but duped into intimacy, and /liking/, which he resents even more. No more than anyone else does he appreciate someone making a fool out of him, and the fact that it's the same woman who screwed him over the last time is additional insult to injury.
Emma makes me purple. But I like that, the cobalt and the blue; Chris's colors are normally green and black, so introducing the blue is a nice call-out to the occasion. And the uniform.
<< More than you know, >> Emma breathes, wrapping his mind in warm arms, scented with sweat and perfume and spices. << I don't suppose an 'I'm sorry' would matter? >> "I'm /trying/ to be nice."
Chris flinches, though the wince is invisible on the harshly disciplined face. "Noted," he says, and takes a step forward. It is guilt that pushes him toward the door, an unrelated tangle of shame and fatigue that has knotted more than one mind over the last few days. "If you're heading that way anyway, I'd appreciate the ride."
He flinches because after all this time, he still isn't accustomed to the sound of a voice speaking in his head -- one that isn't his, at any rate -- nor should he be. Telepathy is not something that pops up in the common way for him, and even if it were someone he trusted (which, among telepaths, there's a grand total of maybe 0) there would still be that swift kick of reaction, mentally if not visibly to the eye.
Emma's telepathy is hot, I have to say, and I'm constantly stealing imagery from her. Every so often I read someone else's log and am surprised and delighted by the way that other people's minds just don't /work/ the way mine do. It would never occur to me to pose that, or think that, or write that way. It's a good reminder that you are not all figments of my imagination, or at the very least, if you are, my imagination is really thorough.
Back to Emma's telepathy. Her choice of scents and sensation is apropos here, though it may be more a case of habit rather than conscious manipulation. Chris is a very sensual person -- not so much in the sexual meaning of the word (though there is that) but more in that he takes in the world through his senses. Touch, smell, taste... he is a sybarite, a latent hedonist, and so pairing communication with scent and sensation is something that he responds to viscerally. The smells -- sweat, perfume, spices -- evokes their past sexual intimacy, not all of it unpleasant; the embrace, even if it isn't physical, provides the illusion of touch. Tremendously intimate touch, since it is mental, not something that he can simply push away or ignore. That, paired with the apology (even if it is a sideways one; she doesn't actually /say/ she's sorry, only ask if it would help) and the conscious statement that she is trying to be nice-- it tips the balance rather nicely.
And there's that guilt, too. Survivor's guilt. It makes him ultra-sensitive at this time of year, and prone to second-guessing himself. At the same time, it pushes him into more reckless action than he would otherwise be prone to. A mind-boggling thought, I know, when his normal lifestyle is hardly the type to inspire warm fuzzies in insurance brokers. But she's said the right words and he's morbidly sensitive enough to allow that he might -- just /might/ -- be a little unfair. And if he can't call a truce on this one day of all days, what the fuck? The entire city lays down the laurels for the NYPD and FDNY during this one day. The courtesy he can expect from criminals today is surely no less than what he can expect from this shining star of society, right? Right?
...Jesus. If I keep this up, I'm never going to finish this.
The door is unlocked, and inside the cool, dark interior, Emma is a puddle of muted light, misty gray layered over pale pink over pale and blemishless skin. She's pushed up against the far door, turned sideways on the seat, ankles crossed and folded to the side, hands in her lap. "At the ceremony?" she asks, perhaps needlessly, given the date and his dress. She slides a glance over the row of shiny little medals, and tucks a smile away.
The silt of memory answers before Rossi does, both unnecessary and hazed by weariness. "Yeah," he says, climbing in with uncharacteristic awkwardness. Unusual exercise, to conform his larger frame to a larger car. He sinks into the far corner of the seat with unsettled limbs, cautiously stretching over a space hitherto unexperienced. "Three things I'll wear dress blues for. You're looking good." Pedantic courtesy. His look follows the compliment, taking for granted the Frost polish.
Again, a pose that I like. Wow. This log is full of poses that I did that I actually like. You realize how rare that is? Diamond out of a duck's ass, man.
Again, a beautiful pose from Emma, very evocative: the muted light, the misty gray, the pink over pale skin. The player is a wonderful writer, and sometimes comes up with the most lovely images, which ... I squirrel away and then pop out at unexpected moments, like the prize in the cereal box. Not quite as cool as the original, but a pleasing copy, nonetheless! The issue of the medals (again with backstory) is that Emma has been stealing and returning his medals, bit by bit, at least at this point in time. They're like -- trophies, maybe. Or memorabilia? Little pieces of Chris's soul that she can hold onto and possess, I suppose, though I don't know that she imbues them with that much meaning. (Does she?) You really have to wonder about her feelings towards him.
I like the image of the 'silt of memory.' God knows it's been washed clean often enough by Emma's interference. There are times when I actually pay attention to the physicality that I claim I pose decently: this is one of those times, when what I'm posing actually makes sense. I'm surprised that I thought about this detail, in fact; it's uncharacteristic of me. Being naturally insensitive myself, I'm not usually aware of this kind of detail -- the awkwardness, the adjustment of habit when faced with a new situation. It's the sort of thing that Magneto always manages to bring out in his poses, which makes me crazy with envy. I've been trying to be more observant in real life, but there's a lifetime of habit there to overcome, so I'm afraid I can only report indifferent success.
Holy crap. A model just walked by my cube. Men should not be allowed to be that gorgeous without an airbrush.
Chris is a reverse snob, which is to say, he clings to his blue collar roots with a fierce pride and determination. Being in the lap of luxury is unsettling, and unnerving. He usually manages to carry through on a wave of hostility and sheer chutzpah and arrogance. Today, in a less truculent frame of mood, and faced with a woman he has no need to pretend for, he is simply and almost naively bemused.
"Ceremonies, charities, and...?" She accepts the compliment with a quirk of lip and brow and leans to rap a knuckle on the privacy glass risen between front and back. A moment later the car pulls away from the curb, bullying it's way back into the flow of traffic.
"Funerals, weddings and direct orders," Rossi counters, a hint of uncertainty smudging the mind's color while hands search for place to redistribute themselves. On the lap it is, then, the flat-topped cap balanced on a knee. Shoulders and spine set themselves gingerly against the seat back; trapped in luxury, he glowers sullenly at Emma, a wolf in a bow tie. His medals -- all of them -- gleam in the window's light. "More of the first than the second."
Such a disparity between their two lives. The first two things that leap to Emma's mind are a perfect reflection of her idea of formal occasions: impersonal ones, organized gatherings where the focus is a cause rather than an person. And in the converse, there's Chris, whose life is built around individuals rather than ideals. Funerals first -- there are so many more of those, especially of late -- and then weddings, two events that are the most significant in any person's life.... though not, perhaps, for Emma. The last one, direct orders, covers all the cases suggested by Emma but adds a different twist to them. Chris, ultimately, is a man under orders. He is a man who has, for all his alpha dog qualities, chosen to be subservient to someone else for the greater good. Emma-- let's just say subservience is not one of her defining qualities. Would she choose to be second to someone, say Jean, if it meant that a greater good would be fulfilled? If she knew it would mean being second forever?
Commentaries are funny. I read back over the stuff I'm saying and it sounds like we were being /so deep/ when we played this, but really, we weren't. It's just entertaining to call out the differences in worldview that are reflected in the way we play and portray our characters. There's two completely different levels of meaning in Emma and Rossi's answers. The uniform means something to Rossi, something personal and important. To Emma, I think to some extent she maybe views it as just another pretty suit in a wardrobe.
Emma refuses to be intimidated by his dark looks. As she leans back, she shifts, left shoulder digging into the seat back, left hand tucking under her thigh, right hand kept still and careful in her lap, left knee pulled up to the seat so her foot (bare foot, heels left on the floor on Rossi's side) hooks behind her right knee. Empathy settles heavily between them, offering nor seeking comfort, merely companionship.
Rossi's thoughts are more armored than mere prickles, more jagged than errant. Fractured by the day and the company, his silence is initially a thing wound tight, humming like a string drawn too taut. Empathy erodes the edges, blunting the uneven blades. After a time the stiff shoulders ease; a breath sighs out, flavored with rue. Companionship. Odd. Quaint. Surreal. But companionship, nonetheless.
I'm bad at posing to silence. I'm bad at posing silence. This doesn't mean I don't appreciate it! Chris normally doesn't handle silence well, at least of the kind that he doesn't make -- but the empathy makes the difference. Emma manipulates Chris rather well in this scene, though I don't know that it was really conscious or intended to be manipulation. By not pushing, by simply offering companionship, she lets him find his own space and relax into it, where thrusting unwanted emotional reaction on him would make him close tighter and grow more armored.
It doesn't hurt that she settles herself a little more informally in her seat. One of those small psychological tricks that Chris sometimes uses is to mirror another person's pose, not immediately, but in a vague sort of reflection: sometimes just in attitude rather than actual pose. It's one of those habitual things now, and so the way Emma just kicks off her heels and curls up makes him settle as well in an almost Pavlovian response. Not quite, but sort of. Funny how the tricks we use to manipulate other people can end up manipulating us.
I use the image of the tightly-tuned string a little too much. I blame my musician background. I really need to find another one.
Emma stretches her leg out, eyes and head dropping to consider her toes a moment before the foot falls back to the floor of the car and she settles deeper into the cushions and peeks back at him, tracing the lines of jaw and shoulder and chest through the veil of lashes, counting the medals hanging there. "How are you?" she asks quietly.
The fine-drawn mouth curves again, skirting a smile that is more honest than the last. "You tell me," Rossi says, failing at a sneer. He turns the cap in broad, capable hands, turning the wink of metal up to be smoothed by a thumb's pad. "I'm doing good, all things considered. Been better, but been a lot worse. You?" Awareness of her attention presses against his senses; he glances up to meet her gaze, green eyes hooded. "Still alive."
Such a throwaway question. "How are you?" is supposed to elicit the response, "Fine. You?" Between these two, though, it's a loaded question, and the answers are almost always different.
He answers honestly enough, by his lights. It's so far back now that I'm afraid I can't really remember what was going on in his life -- but it's Rossi, so what are the chances that things are going smoothly? Pretty remote. Now that I think about it, I believe this may actually be after the incident where she came to visit him at his apartment and asked him to investigate if she ever turned up missing. A curious thing to ask an apparent enemy, but Chris is a cop, if nothing else, and Emma knows well enough that he can be trusted to pursue things in the face of almost all opposition. The kinds of roadblocks that might be thrown up by the likes of Shaw and Magneto would simply be motivation on top of incentive.
I like props, though I'm hit or miss about remembering them. The cap is such a prop: I do a fairly good job of remembering it until near the end, when it sort of fades into nowhere. But as part of his uniform, and as a thing that he doesn't really wear all that often anymore, he's fairly conscious of it. It brings back memories, does that hat: nostalgia of the days when he was a beat cop and life was /easy/.
A clean white line runs up the middle of her scalp, hair smoothed down and coiled into a low-sitting bun at the nape of her neck. She lifts her head to meet his gaze squarely, blue eyes flashing like shattered glass in the sunlight in defiance of his own guardedness. "There's something to be said for that. Survival is an underrated talent." She steals another glance at the rows of ribbon marching across his shoulder, and amusement creeps into her expression. "You never did show me all of your medals."
"You had them. You could've looked all you wanted," Rossi says, flicking a fingernail's crescent against the whisper of ribbon, and glances down. A pang escapes the closed mind, flitting like a small dagger through his ward before being captured and stuffed back behind the eyes. He exhales a sharp, self-mocking snort. "And after all that, I lost one anyway. This one's Vic's. His widow lent it to me for the services."
I mention this because it struck me at the time. That picture of the white line up the middle of her scalp. I don't know why it sticks with me, but it does; it's one of those tiny little details about other people that I always notice unconsciously but never actually makes it into my RP. Magneto's player is really good at bringing that into his poses. Emma apparently is too. I should learn.
Medals. That private joke between them, though more on her side than on his. One of them is still missing at this juncture, and Emma is the one who has it -- though Rossi doesn't know that, actually. Thus the replacement medal, borrowed from a family member.
Like I said, the uniform means something to him, as do the medals themselves. He has a strong connection with tradition and with his past; Vic, I determined on a whim, was a cousin who served as the kind of older brother figure that younger Chris should have had but never really did: a role model of sorts who died when Chris was old enough to understand what that meant. He's much older now, and the memory of the emotional attachment has faded enough that that's not really what causes that pang; rather, it's the leap of association from dead cousin cop to dead 9/11 cops to his own survival that prompts that little stab of emotion. It's not clear in the pose, which I think I did deliberately: no need to be obvious, after all, and emotions are rarely so clear-cut that we can trace them back to the exact source and the exact stimulus that prompts them.
I speculate why Emma finds them so fascinating. Not only because they're shiny and colorful, and because they're important to Rossi, but I think maybe because they're part of a narrative, stories about a life that's really very alien to the one that Emma leads. They're like little windows into something that's probably been a mostly closed book to her. What does the rich and pampered Emma Frost know about day-to-day self-sacrifice by normal, ordinary homo sapiens who lack telepathic power and still put the little they have on the line? Then again, it could be just because they're shiny and colorful. I do not know! Emma's player will have to explain it.
Emma leans toward him, toward the medals, curiosity peeling away a layer of formality. "Looking isn't the same as being shown. I don't know the stories behind them, for example." Her hands remain, for the moment, safely in her lap and tucked under her leg. She looks up. "Who was Vic?"
The dead man's shape sketches itself in shades of blue, black and green -- the Rossi colors -- before the voice puts a framework of identity around it. "Cousin Vic," Chris says, hand sliding across the little ribbon. "Out in Harlem. Got nailed by a drunk driver hit-and-run while serving a ticket. Walked away, and then had some kind of aneurysm and dropped dead two days later in the middle of dinner. -- They're just bits of metal and ribbon," he adds, veiling discomfort with dismissal. The finger flicks again. Plink. "Shiny. For the chicks."
Hah. And in fact, Emma goes ahead and asks, though it may be for sheer conversational purposes rather than real interest. The way she asks, though, seems like real interest. And Rossi ... responds to that by telling her the truth, instead of putting her off with hostility for prying into something that is, after all, somewhat personal. He tells Vic's story, rather than the medal's: of the two, it is the other man's life and the inconsequentiality of his death that is significant, rather than the triviality that resulted in both of them being awarded the same medal / commendation. Don't ask me which one it is, because I couldn't for the life of me tell you.
Having given her blunt fact, he promptly slides into flippancy. This is, I have concluded, the way that he reacts to anything that might touch too closely onto real feeling. He is embarrassed by honest emotion, at least insofar as he is concerned and response to him might be concerned; his dread of pity or sympathy is sincere, and given any situation where he might end up the recipient of it, however tangentially, he promptly diverts and deflects to make it clear that there's no need.
I like the way I wrote that, the sketching of colors and the framework of identity, mind and voice harmonizing together.
"For the chicks," Emma echoes dryly, rebuffed mentally and physically. She looks up and away, out of the window to gauge their progress.
<< For the widows, >> Rossi says in silence, forgetting. "Worked on you," he says lightly, aloud. Plink. He slouches down into the seat, a hand smoothing over the upholstery with a sensualist's pleasure. Grudging. His hand idles at another bit of metal and ribbon, the forebrain automatically identifying by the shape of it under fingers, where sight is turned towards the passing scenery. Purple Shield. Injury taken in the line of duty.
I'm not entirely sure here about Emma's pose. Rebuffed physically -- by the finger flick? Or does she mean that she retreats physically? And mentally ... that I'm not entirely sure about either. Is it the flippancy that pushes her back? Or the memory of the dead man itself? Does she have the nicety of mind to draw back from stepping on what might be sensitive ground unnecessarily?
My answering pose is a little unclear. For a moment Rossi forgets that Emma is a telepath and can hear his thoughts, so under the flippancy the unspooling of real thought continues. 'For the widows' is for Vic's widow, who lent him the medal, but also for the widows of the men who died in 9/11. There were a lot.
Aloud, he continues to deflect, inviting Emma to keep to shallow waters by being a little provoking, if not seriously. For all he mocks the importance of the medals, they're important enough to him that he knows the shape of them under his fingers. Not necessarily because he's proud of them, so much as they are sort of waystones by which he tracks the path of his life. Each medal is like his scars, in a less indelible way; he remembers the stories and the occasions, and can point to one and say, "I was there, doing this. I was /that/ person."
He's gotten more than one Purple Shield.
Emma steals a quick glance at the officer as the thought slip free of lowering guards. Then she sits back, both shoulders meeting the same upholstery he fondles, though with much less notice or appreciation. "/You/ worked on me. Your medals were beside the point," she mutters, apparently to the air.
Amusement is freer for that, spun out of the ashes of his mood into silver thread. "Flattery," Chris says dryly, "will get you nowhere. You've already gotten pretty much everything there is to get. There's nothing left." His elbow settles into the armrest; fisted into its support, his head turns to attend on Emma. "You tell Shaw we slept together?"
For such an arrogant guy, Chris is ... weirdly humble. It isn't so much that he has low self-esteem, because he doesn't, exactly; he's well aware of the effect that he has (or can have) on women, and has been cheerfully willing to exploit it in the past. But somehow-- it's all very shallow and false to him, like a game that grown-ups play when they're bored. There isn't and there has never been any real investment or meaning attached to it, so when Emma says that /he/ worked on her, he doesn't take it seriously. Which is unfortunate, because if he had -- if she meant it (did she?) -- something really different could've happened between them. Maybe. Or maybe not. But certainly there would be some better understanding reached there, laid in for the future.
He means it when he tells her she has already gotten everything there is to get. In that he devalues the importance of his opinion, I think, and how highly it can be weighed by people who know him. Again, that weird humility. He doesn't value his own respect for other people, or his emotional perceptions of other people, because -- those things are irrelevent in the grand scheme of things, I suppose. He views her reply as acceptance of his attempt to move on from serious matters to trivial flipancy. And now, since we're talking about unimportant shit, let's talk about Shaw.
"Not everything," she says reproachfully, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. The coil of hair loosens and slips. Her elbow finds the curve of door handle designed to receive it, and a flicker of discomfort ghosts across her unguarded expression. "Maybe. I don't know. Why?"
"Everything I'm willing to give. I could swear--" Chris begins, slouching into his arm. Even the car's long body is inadequate for that physicality, poked by the reminder of Shaw into febrile, feral life. It yawns; it wakes, uncoiling to stretch. Rossi shrugs, a murmur of aggression like charcoal across his thoughts. "Maybe it's nothing."
Liar. He wasn't willing to give what she got to begin with. It's a falsehood, a white lie made for the sake of an illusion of control. He knows it, she knows it, so really, why bother? Some habits are hard to break. Emma writes in her comentary that what she wants is his respect, his affection, his -- emotions, I guess. A lot of Emma is is wrapped up in that need to be loved, I think. (Disclaimer: I do not play Emma, so really? I am just talking out my ass when I make these random statements about her. It is Emma according to Rossi's player. Tough. My commentary, my thoughts.) Chris is capable of love, certainly, and of strong emotional ties -- he can be incredibly loyal and makes an incredible friend if you get that far, though his casual, occasional kindness to complete strangers is pretty potent in and of itself -- so I don't know. It would certainly be a challenge to win over that defensiveness, so there's that appeal, but I surmise that there is more to it. Simply calling him a challenge is a convenient white lie, like Rossi's, and prevents Emma from lifting the covers to look at anything uglier or more compelling underneath. Forgiveness for what she did; understanding, acceptance, respect from someone that maybe she does actually admire from a certain perspective--
And then we go back to Shaw.
Look at the dog make himself look big. Seriously. Men. Reading this reminds me that Rossi has been so much more subdued lately; he's moving slower, less restless, his physicality has been more self-contained and less prone to expression. He still reaches out for physical contact, but he stays safe, not expanding his personal space significantly. It's a fairly important shift in his personality, though it's come on him gradually.
Emma wrote in her commentary that her character was rather pleased at what she perceived as jealousy. What Rossi and Shaw have isn't jealousy over her, though -- at least, from Shaw's perspective it might have been. What Chris has is simple and uncomplicated antipathy. There are times when two people will meet each other and simply spark the wrong way. This is what happened with Chris and Shaw. Two very alpha men, both very physical, both inclined to be controlling, both fairly ruthless in their own ways. Shaw's willing to go further than Chris is (the Jehovah's witness incident proved that) but Chris also has and has had something that Shaw wanted: namely, Emma's interest, completely outside of material benefits to be gained. It isn't about Emma at all, really. It's about /mine/. On Chris's side, Emma doesn't even enter it at all. It's probably just as well that Emma not know that.
Emma opens her eyes to razor thin slits and looks at him out of the corner of her eye, attention drawn and fascinated by the glimpses into the stirring maw, a morbid curiosity tempted into poking, perhaps unwisely. "What?"
Rossi grins into silence, a hard, fast flash as unforgiving as any of Shaw's best. Jehovah's witnesses; a gun and the fear of Magneto. It isn't God, but it will do. "Doesn't matter," he says aloud, masculine antagonism reveling in the demural. Alpha dog hostility. "Never could see what women saw in him. Damnedest thing. --How are you?" he adds, focusing the entirety of his attention -- his interest -- on Emma. Eyes pluck sharply at her polished exterior, discarding it with an unflattering abruptness. "You still worried?"
Emma snorts in sudden illumination and manages to keep the accompanying smirk from her face. She bends her head forward, and looks down at the fingers in her lap. They roll a diamond-pocked tennis bracelet around her wrist. "Of course. It keeps me on guard."
Oh. Right. Magneto and Rossi scared some of Shaw's boys. That was fun!
I don't know exactly what to say here. There isn't a great deal. Holy crap. We might actually make it past a round with less than a novel.
The dark brow draws together, furrowing -- but it is a token frown, amusement still fanged and heavy-pawed on the earlier thought. "Keeps you entertained?" Rossi asks easily, skimming his wrist over leather (like his lost overcoats, the wistful thought murmurs. Fucking Magneto. Have to buy a new--) on its way to setting the hat on the seat beside him. "Stressful way to live."
"I suppose. It is thrilling in it's own way," she shrugs audibly, turning her head to look at him over the curve of a gray clad shoulder. "No more so than your own line of work."
"Life and death?" and this time the mockery is real, self-directed and sardonic. Rossi digs his foot into the floor of the car, bracing his long-legged seat into the cushions. "What's the point? What do you get out of it?"
I find it rather funny that I just told Emma's player that her character was endearing when she was about to pull a fast one on someone, like a "big, feral cat," especially in light of my pose above. Emma is definitely cat-like in a lot of ways, so the amusement that she prompts from time to time reflects that. Lo, how I remember the presence of the prop. I give myself points.
The problem with asking questions like "What do you get out of it?" is that sometimes, just sometimes, the question can boomerang back at you. With the majority of people, though, Chris banks on the self-interest and self-absorption that will take that question and carry it on into other areas of the other person's life and thoughts. Open-ended questions are the key: not questions that can be answered with 'yes' or 'no,' but questions that need full sentences to answer them, actual arrangements of words that lead to a progressive narrative.
The self-directed mockery is complicated. There's a lot in it: there's the awareness of his own survivor's guilt, and a general contempt at himself for having it; there's a rub of acknowledgment about his own idealism, normally covered and carefully buried; there's a memory of his seeming inability to stay out of trouble and go charging into ridiculously dangerous situations simply because he can't stay out of them-- all things that he personally finds contemptible about himself, but taken as a totality, sort of form the bedrock of his character.
"Safety, power, revenge... You know. What every girl wants," Emma answers, matching mockery with sweet scorn.
Curiosity, rarely far under the surface, bumps against the flatscan discipline to worry at the reply. "Power," says Rossi, who flicks his gaze around the interior of the car. The word echoes in the mind, caustic. << How much is enough? >> "Not the same thing as control, anyway. Nothing's /safe/. Revenge?"
Power is a pretty empty thing insofar as Rossi is concerned. What constitutes real power? Power over life and death? He has that, to a certain extent. Power over a person's life? Emma has just about the most complete power there imaginable: telepathy, and of a type that she's willing to use to get her own way. And at what point is it enough? He's been in board rooms and high society homes as much as he's been in the bodegas and the alleys, and dead people are still dead people and the perps are still perps, regardless of their jobs or their influence. He's not naive enough not to recognize that the Law can often take a backseat to the influence wielded by the most powerful, but those people are pretty rare, and he's just uncynical enough to believe that eventually it all comes back to bite them in the ass in one way or another.
That Emma is scornful about the reply doesn't negate the possibility that she's telling the truth, or at least a fraction of the truth. He takes it at face value, regardless, and throws it back at her.
Emma purses her lips, her eyes growing narrow and dark as she tuts. "What do you want to hear, Detective? My tragic history, complete with poverty and perhaps abandonment? My rescue by a savior who turns out to be the devil himself? Perhaps a little bit of the penitent sinner?" she purrs, spinng truth and lie together on an insubstantial merry-go-round. "Or maybe you'd /rather/ I were the 'woman terrible, with justice in one hand and vengeance in the other.'"
"You can read my mind." Heavy lids slide to, stained-glass green deepening in turn. "You tell /me/."
Emma brushes telepathic fingers past the cob-webbed interiors of his thoughts, much like a puff of air on the back of his neck. And then she smiles, scimitar-slashed and edged. "Do you always need your women to order you around?"
Chris flinches. There is no hiding it; the recoil at that light touch proves more than even discipline can hobble. "Fuck you," he says, harsh, and then, blank, "Need -- what? I'm Italian. We like strong women."
Haha. Emma's reply. It's suited to look like scorn and contempt, but it sort of isn't quite. Not enough to entirely fool Chris, though he doesn't actually say so; he suspects the grain of truth in there, and doesn't follow it because -- well, because there's a sort of unspoken truce happening here, isn't there? Emma promised to be nice. And he, perhaps a little belatedly but nonetheless, he takes a semi-polite step back and does not pick at it like he might otherwise. He recognizes that bitterness and inclination towards mockery because he uses it himself. Can't cheat a cheater. In this one regard, they're cats of the same stripe.
Then there's the line about strong women. There's a miscommunication here. I like miscommunications in RP. Perfect communication is so -- inhuman, and so artificial. I like it when there's a disconnect, where two characters sort of pass like ships in the night and are left going, huh? at the end of the trip.
Chris's retort, 'you tell /me/,' isn't meant as a directive, as in 'you tell me what to think.' It's a challenge. He knows what he's thinking; the question that he's asking is, figure out what I'm thinking. It's his invitation to her to carry on this line of conversation if she wants. She takes him up on it, but not quite in the way that he expects, and certainly not in the way that he understands his invitation to mean; her misunderstanding is that he is suggesting she actually tell him what to think, which is an understandable misconstruction to make on his words, especially for someone who is used to, well, telling people what to think.
He should really be careful about what he says to a telepath. A colloquialism can take on a whole new and entirely unexpected meaning when the person you're talking to can actually do what you're suggesting she do. Also, Emma totally stole that from me. Scimitar-slashed and edged. SHE DID. Considering how much I steal from her, I take it as a compliment.
The knee-jerk reaction of telling her to fuck off is -- you know, my character swears a /lot/ -- a reaction to the telepathic intrusion rather than to her suggestion that he needs women to order him around. I think that's pretty clear, but just to make sure. He's frankly baffled, and again, we have a misunderstanding; she doesn't get what he's saying, he doesn't get what she's saying, and in general there's this, "have we changed the subject?" sort of bewilderment on his side. It's true that he respects strong women, and in fact, /needs/ strong women in his life. In general, Rossi women are strong. They have to be: their men would run roughshod over them otherwise, and weak women simply do not survive in the rough and tumble environment of a Rossi family household. Not long term, anyway.
A lot of Chris's short-lived relationships were short because his girlfriends were weak, or rather, more passive-aggressive than simply aggressive. He lacks the patience to deal with a passive-aggressive personality in his daily life. Directness is key, with him; though he is capable of surprising subtlety when he chooses, it takes a while for him to develop enough respect or caring for somebody to make that effort. (Outside of the job, that is.) Any woman who expects him off the bat to cater to her roundabout, convoluted "I'm from Planet Venus" communication style is doomed to disappointment.
Now I'm totally off track. Back to the story in progress.
"As I recall..." Emma replies, looking upwards in false thought and letting her voice trail off suggestively. Then her eyes swivel back to him, orbs of liquid sapphire in a marble cut face. "I suppose everyone has to have their excuses."
Bemusement deepens, ruffling the foyer of the detective's mind. "The hell?" Chris slaps back, more puzzled than angry. Hostility expires, unbalanced. A leg draws up to become a hatstand to the roving flip of cap. "You're cracked, Frost," he decides -- and then grins, with a moment's rare, unfettered grace. Boyish. Unshadowed. "You like this in the boardroom?"
Chris is a little knocked off balance because it's clear that there's some other conversation that took place here, at least in Emma's mind, but he ... wasn't part of it. Although she seems to think he was. He has an appreciation of the ridiculous, even when he's a part of it, so the strange sideways shift brings out his sense of humor, a rare glimpse of how he is and can be when he isn't threatened and when he's with his mates. There's an opportunity there, a small gap in the wall where Emma could have carried on and they could have been almost -- not quite, but /almost/ -- companionable, in a lighter, less tension-ridden way.
I used the word foyer there, but what I apparently meant was vestibule, which is the entryway of churches and cathedrals. Damn. When we did the Windex log, Chris's mind was compared to a cathedral, which tied back into his past as a man of God. I /meant/ to call back to it, but I failed. FAILED. Vocabulary, why do you fail me? I did get the word 'grace' right, though, so I give myself half-points.
The prop does not, however. Hello, hat!
"Better." Challenge layers and wraps around her tone, echoed in another breath of telepathic power rippling across his mind. She turns away and straightens. "But I told you. You have safe passage. I'll sheath my claws if they're too scary for you."
This time the detective manages not to wince, but it is a close thing; old scars throb under that touch, blossoming back to ugly, remembered bruises repressed by will. "Woman of your word," Rossi says, smile fading with the too-short second of peace. Eyes glitter. "Nothing to see here. Move along, Frost. You'll find more interesting brains in your high-powered meetings -- but then again, you have a taste for blue collar cuisine, don't you?"
But of course, Emma has to remind him again who and what she is, and by extension what she did to him, and so that closes that opening for the rest of the trip, at least until the very end when he's ready to leave. While they manage to be more or less civil to each other for the remainder of the ride, there's still that wall between them, though earnest hostility is left behind in the face of more demanding curiosity.
Paths not taken! I'm curious what would have happened if they'd been able to actually set aside their past for a little while. Maybe some other time--
"Interest is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?" she snips back, tugging the hem of her skirt to straighten the line running across her knees, then smoothing away a crease.
For a span of heartbeats, Rossi makes no reply. His thoughts slip like silver fish through speculation, interrogation, the currents of logic and cynical experience. "I don't get you," he admits at last, gaze settled thoughtfully on the delicate, graceful profile. "What's your story? Most people I can figure out, eventually, but you're -- what gives?"
Emma laughs, merriment bubbling on the breath of exasperation. "I'm an enigma? That is a rather lovely thought. Most men don't take the time to try and figure /me/ out. Just how to get me," she replies, dancing around the question.
I stole that silver fish line from -- I don't remember. Windex RP? Anyway, I stole it from Emma. Fair's fair.
Chris recognizes quite clearly that she hasn't answered his question, but then again, he has no real expectation that she would. The fact that he is more curious than hostile after that jab of telepathy is a good thing (or a bad thing, depending on your point of view). Her squirming away from questions is enough to prick the detective in him, less from the criminal instinct perspective than from the sheer people perspective. Chris is a people person, in the sense that he has an abiding and entrenched fascination and curiosity about how and why people do the things they do, how they work, how they think, what motivates them. It's part of what makes him a good cop, but it's a personal trait that carries beyond law.
A lot of victims feel the need to put logic behind the acts that made them victims; senselessness of crime is almost as bad as the act itself. Chris is luckier (hah!) than most, in that he knows perfectly well what the reason behind the crime was. Given the same situation, he grants that it's possible that he might have acted to protect his people, though certainly not in the same way, even with the same powers. (Easy for him to say, lacking the tools and the experience that shapes the way people use those tools.) What he doesn't have is understanding of the person who did it to him. In this sense, he is unluckier than most victims; other people do not have to face their violator again and again in the course of daily -- or at least, routine -- life, without recourse to justice or a reasonable expectation of safety. Every time he runs into Emma, to a certain extent it's like being violated again.
As a guy from a very macho background and a cop who is used to being the aggressor and has no real experience or familarity with being the victim, he doesn't really have the personal tools to deal with that. So what he does instead is the Chris equivalent of denial; he makes Emma's character into a case instead, a mystery that is meant to be solved. It sets things at a remove, just one more file in his stack of open cases that has nothing to do with having your mind raped and rewritten.
I don't think Chris finds Emma an /enigma/. Which is to say, she has certain behavior patterns that he can readily understand and that he's seen many many times before. Most people are not really surprising, when you've been around and met as many types as Chris has. But there's still that something there, which sort of defies the persona. He's curious about that, about the 'what might have been' that's still living under the covers somewhere.
In retrospect, Chris would be a very dangerous telepath. That curiosity of his would probably make for a truly bad combination.
Holy crap. It's too long for one post. Uh. Guess it needs two!
Continued in Part II
Date: 9/11/06
Players: Emma & Rossi
It is five years after September 11th. It's funny to think this, but when I was growing up I always heard that people of my mother's generation always remembered where they were when they heard JFK was shot. The generation before that had Pearl Harbor. It's one of those things that I always took as an aphorism, a cliche that everybody talked about but nobody really did. I have problems remembering what I ate for breakfast this morning; be able to remember back 20-odd years to a specific moment in time seemed like an impossibility, a piece of nostalgic fiction.
On September 11, 2001, I was living in my apartment in Redwood City. My roommate pulled me out of bed to drag me to the living room, and I watched the twin towers fall on my 32-inch television. I was wearing blue flannel pajamas with Tweety bird on them. Apparently, you live and you learn. September 11, 2006.
Five years. Six hours. Twelve minutes.
Forty-six seconds.
The streets of the Financial District are populated, but it is the detritus of mordant holiday that fills the sidewalks, civilians in groups of somber black, of patriotic red, white and blue. Business suits -- the norm, on any other day -- are subdued and scattered through the thin crowds; few take to the streets on such a day, where memorials begin the morning, and services end them. The Secret Service has no sense of humor. New York City, today, has forgotten it.
Most of the uniforms have gone into hiding, shuttled from place to place as badges of honor for the remembering. The set of dress blues ambling down the sidewalk is an island to himself, the flat-topped cap precise under an arm, the hands stripped of the gloves that peep from a pocket. The breeze tugs at Rossi's hair, and touches on the flush of skin. It is a beautiful day.
It is always a beautiful day.
Emma did a commentary for me on this log, so this is my answer to it -- a little belated, yes, but it's like cheese, isn't it? Age only improves it. The set is long, but I was in a maudlin mood, which was due as much to Rossi's mood as my own. I like it, insofar as my sets go. Of late, I've shifted to a more ... conversational style of set, I suppose I should say, mid-scene and less scene-setting as scene mood-setting. There's an important distinction there which, in the reading of the above, I realize is sort of crap because once upon a time I was able to set both mood /and/ scene. Of course, it came at the cost of the world's longest set.
I like the breaking out of the first three lines, the dramatic effect: from great to small, from the emotional resonance of the first line -- September 11 -- to the triviality of the last. (Forty-six seconds.) I spelled out the words, I seem to remember, because numbers are academic and clinical and cold, and a countdown, and the time I wanted was /words/, with all the weight of the syllables and the sounds. I wanted to force the reader to sound them out in their head, rather than simply glance and comprehend.
I do this rather often with numbers. There's something more ... I don't know. Trite? about the numeral, except for that one: 11. Nobody who is reading this now could possibly avoid sounding out the entirety of that phrase. 'September 11.' It's one phrase that will always more impact in the numeral than in the spelling out.
I was in New York City for one of these anniversaries, though not for this one. New Yorkers are a tough lot, and business goes on even through the state and city memorials that go on during that day. The effects of 9/11 continue through the course of daily life, anyway, to an extent that I remember astonished me when I was there. "She lost her husband and her cousin in the towers," my friend told me about a woman he introduced to me while I was in Brooklyn. "They were FDNY." He threw it out there, not casually, but as though it were a matter of course, and I remember that to me it seemed like a huge deal, whereas for them, it was -- well, not a lesser deal, but rather something that they'd grown familiar with, so that it was less of a burden and more of a fact of life.
Coming from California, 9/11 seems like this /thing/, this stoppage in time where everything froze and there was a before, and there was an after, but they were two completely separate things. For a native who lived through it, 9/11 seems to be this thing that simply continued, until it became one of those things that you push into the back of your mind and carry on regardless, like the neighbor who plays polka music in the mornings and the third laundry machine from the left that only does cold.
Sorry. I meander. Back to the pose.
As I say, I liked this set. I like Rossi in dress uniform, walking his way back to the house (a la the station) because he needs to be alone for a while just to be himself, and a taxi cab would be too fast, and riding in a car with the others, he'd have to be the cop. 9/11 is an emotionally fraught day for him, as it is for a lot of people, and he makes an island of himself, an empty shell of a body -- a very handsomely attired body, because the NYPD blues are hot, yo -- moving of its own volition down the street. How his walking down the street in public in uniform means he doesn't have to be the cop is a little hard to explain; the best way to put it is that the uniform the water around his island. He can go through the motions, but there's nothing vested in it. His body carries on, his mind is elsewhere.
Like many of his colleagues, he lives with one foot always planted in that day. Thus, it is a beautiful day. (Today.) It is always a beautiful day. (9/11.) Somewhere it lives on in history, never ending, suspended in memory. There was an awesome show for a while called Third Watch, and they did an episode called September Tenth that ... I think won Emmys, actually, but what they kept reiterating, and what the interviewed cops and firemen on the show said, was that it was a beautiful day. A perfectly beautiful day. A gorgeous day, and then the towers fell. For those of you who haven't seen this show, I highly recommend it. Even if it's just for that one episode. One of the actresses in the show, her husband actually was in the FDNY and was called out to the towers. No show out there did 9/11 better.
For those who lived, and live still. Down this street, cars nudge aside bicyclists and pedestrians, hardly making better time than those on foot. A sleek, long car, hovering between the labels of luxury and limo, glides along with the rest of humanity, shielding it occupants from the press of the plebes. Inside, Emma drops paperwork to her lap and leans forward to peer out of the window, eyes slipping back across faces and forms to settle on the ambling blues. She smiles, and a moment later, the car edges into a firezone along the sidewalk.
The officer ambles on, pale gaze drifting across the car sliding in ahead of him. His jaw moves, miming the presence of gum that is absent in reality. He has a beat cop's lazy stride, the loose swing of leg that eats up ground without haste or waste. Three, four, five strides bring him to the car's rear; another three bring him to the driver's side. He pauses. Knuckles rap. "Yo," he says, desultory with warning. "You can't park here, buddy. Move it along."
Going through the motions, I said. And there's one. It's a trivial thing, to ask a car to move along: part of the cop persona, not really requiring anything of real intelligence. If he were thinking, he probably would've just let it go and moved on, but he's operating on auto-pilot, and auto-pilot marks it as a ticketable offence. So.
Hi, Emma.
She smiles when she sees him, which -- I never know with Emma. Is there real pleasure in seeing him? Or is it the prospect of toying with him a little again that makes her smile? I'd like to think it's the former, at least partially, though I can't imagine why she'd find pleasure in his company, unless it's the memory of the times they /had/ when she was Amber. He certainly hasn't been sweetness and light with her since. And then there's the knowledge that she has of him, the actual person. I'm biased, personally, but in a lot of ways, Chris really is likeable. He's an asshole, yes, and he can be beyond a dick, but he's also fundamentally a really good man, with a surprising amount of charm.
The near rear window lowers with a whisper while the far rear door opens. A harried looking little mouse of a woman pops out of the side and fumbles with pads of paper and pens and phones and such, while a slim arm, covered in a pearl-grey jacket sleeve, unfolds out of the window. "We'll move along momentarily, officer," Emma murmurs, just loud enough to carry to Rossi's ears.
The detective jerks, recognition aborting the immediate retort; attention, split from driver to disembarking passenger, turns to that pale arm. "You," Rossi says without inflection, Brooklyn's accent skinned and scalped for the word. His mouth closes over an epithet, then opens again for a sardonic: "Should've remembered this is your hunting ground."
Emma mentions in her commentary that she thinks Emma enjoyed being Amber, the girl that Rossi thought that he was seeing for a while. She had the liberty to be herself, without the persona, without the armor, without the lies -- which means that in a way, Rossi has seen Emma in a way that maybe very few (nobody?) has ever really seen. Barring the big lie, that is. Is it possible to be yourself when the entire basis of your identity is a lie? As a result, Rossi's maybe one of the few people who she can be herself with, though ... she often isn't, regardless.
The corollary to that is that of all the people out there today, there is one person who Rossi does not /have/ to be someone else for. That this one person is the person who violated and raped his mind is one of those ironic twists of fate. Of all the people that he should run into today, she is probably the most ... restful? Or at least -- the most honest. In this, he operates from a slightly misguided assumption that she has seen him, the entirety of him (mentally, though physically certainly enters the equation) and so he has nothing left to hide from her. Again, Emma's one of the few people that he can be himself with, though ... again, he often isn't, regardless.
It's a fact that his first reaction on seeing Emma as herself is almost always a quick jerk of fear, which hasn't been muted significantly by ongoing contact; their encounters are rare enough that there's always that first twitch of heartbeat quickening, chest squeezing before he can get it under control. I didn't pose to the empathic response there, but I did in the vocal quality: the emotional reaction was better controlled this time because it came from further away. That is to say, the distraction and the shell he built up around himself to guard against strong emotion serves him in good stead here.
This was back when I was doing good posing. I seem to do better in RP when I'm playing with Emma's player: she's one of a very very small handful of people who seem to bring out the best in me. Or at least, the best I'm capable of at any given moment. As a result of the kind of history he has with her, Chris is always far more raw in those scenes than he is in others. The description of his voice does a better job of conveying his state of mind in her vicinity than any real physical reaction could offer. There are times when his accent slips away, leaving him utterly exposed. It's odd, that. His accent is very much a part of his persona, and in times of emotional stress it can get thicker -- but at the same time, it can also disappear altogether. When it isn't deliberate, it's a sign that he's been peeled away to bone.
It doesn't happen very often.
It's a funny thing. Chris actually acknowledges Emma as a predator; he's a predator himself, so there's a sympathetic -- worldview? No, maybe the world is world-/bent/ -- that they share. The callout to the hunting grounds is recognition of that. Of course, in the battle of the predators, Emma trumps Chris. That doesn't prevent alpha male baring of teeth, however.
I like the description of the poor woman who gets booted out of the car for Chris. Emma assumes an awful lot, doesn't she? I especially love the description of her arm unfolding out of the window. There's an aura of film noir in it, which in a lot of ways epitomizes Emma: she's the femme fatale who strolls into the private eye's office and eventually ends up almost getting him killed. You know the kind. "He needed one hand for the money, one hand for the gun, and two hands for Frost. He wasn't good enough for all three." "Frost's body was a loaded weapon, and she knew how to pull the trigger." You know. that sort of thing.
"I only hunt in the boardrooms here, Detective." The other backseat passenger transfers to the front seat with a resentful glance at the officer, and the arm out the window beckons. "If I give you a promise of safe passage, would you like a lift?"
"How good's your word?" Rossi asks, holding fast to his place in neither retreat nor advance. The jaw works again; the fictional gum works across his tongue, is pressed into the pocket of his cheek, and then is utterly forgotten. Hooded eyes are wary. Watchful. "I'm headed back to the station."
Rhetorical question. No answer that Emma would give Rossi would be convincing, to be honest -- so why does he ask it? It's sort of a stalling tactic while he makes up his mind. He's tempted, to be honest, but he's also got that small itch of curiosity that gets him into trouble time and time again. What will happen? what would happen? And he's curious about her answer; she can, if she wants, /make/ him sit and join her. Will she? And if not, why not? Emma knows Rossi so much better than he knows her, or ... so he tells himself, anyway, though the reality is (maybe?) that they're on fairly even footing in that regard. He doesn't realize it, which is understandable. And like any man who has a scab to pick at, he wants to pick. He's driven to pick. Trying to understand Emma is like ignoring the pain and peeling away the old blood to find the fresh skin underneath. There's a morbid fascination, and -- I'm sorry to say -- a testosterone issue: I have faced my fear! See me roar!
Well, maybe not to that extent. But there's certainly a component of that there. It's curiosity that keeps him standing there, when prudence would (and does) tell him to move on. For all he complains about powerful mutants toying with him, he shares the same instincts that makes them do it. It's a two-way street, to some extent; if he didn't engage them, they wouldn't come. But he can't keep from engaging them because he's driven to know why why why, among other things, so they keep coming back, and round and round we go--
"About as good as anyone's, I suppose. At least you already think the worst of me. How much faith do you have to lose?" Emma teases, withdrawing her arm and scooting back from the door. "It's /just/ to the station, darling."
Det. Rossi's mouth twists, slanting towards a humor that is only a pale shadow of itself; the mind, reflected in cobalt behind, shares nothing of that leavening. "Not a lot of distance between a living room and a bedroom closet," he points out. "A shitload happened anyway, didn't it?"
I forget if this is actually the first time Chris has run into Emma since the whole accidental erasure of 15 years of his life. (There's something about Emma that makes him lose his mind.) (Mine too.) For those who are not in the know, Emma was sleeping with Chris as a ... uh, a side hobby, I guess you could say. She was pretending to be someone else. Well, I mentioned that above. At some point, though, she realized that Chris had recovered his memories and -- there was some other stuff that I don't remember all that clearly. Regardless, she had decided to do something fairly final about it: what, I don't know. He coaxed her back to his place; she agreed for one last fling, nostalgia's sake possibly, or actual affection -- who knows? Does she? -- and then Erik Lensherr showed up.
He (Magneto) was pissed at her (Frost) and moved to kill her. She completely overreacted. Chris lost 15 years of his memory in the backwash; Erik lost closer to 30, and a good time was had by all.
It was hard for Chris. Hard enough that he was wiped to begin with, back in the Windex episode; harder still to know that he was duped by the same woman who had erased him, for whatever reason of her own. Not only duped, but duped into intimacy, and /liking/, which he resents even more. No more than anyone else does he appreciate someone making a fool out of him, and the fact that it's the same woman who screwed him over the last time is additional insult to injury.
Emma makes me purple. But I like that, the cobalt and the blue; Chris's colors are normally green and black, so introducing the blue is a nice call-out to the occasion. And the uniform.
<< More than you know, >> Emma breathes, wrapping his mind in warm arms, scented with sweat and perfume and spices. << I don't suppose an 'I'm sorry' would matter? >> "I'm /trying/ to be nice."
Chris flinches, though the wince is invisible on the harshly disciplined face. "Noted," he says, and takes a step forward. It is guilt that pushes him toward the door, an unrelated tangle of shame and fatigue that has knotted more than one mind over the last few days. "If you're heading that way anyway, I'd appreciate the ride."
He flinches because after all this time, he still isn't accustomed to the sound of a voice speaking in his head -- one that isn't his, at any rate -- nor should he be. Telepathy is not something that pops up in the common way for him, and even if it were someone he trusted (which, among telepaths, there's a grand total of maybe 0) there would still be that swift kick of reaction, mentally if not visibly to the eye.
Emma's telepathy is hot, I have to say, and I'm constantly stealing imagery from her. Every so often I read someone else's log and am surprised and delighted by the way that other people's minds just don't /work/ the way mine do. It would never occur to me to pose that, or think that, or write that way. It's a good reminder that you are not all figments of my imagination, or at the very least, if you are, my imagination is really thorough.
Back to Emma's telepathy. Her choice of scents and sensation is apropos here, though it may be more a case of habit rather than conscious manipulation. Chris is a very sensual person -- not so much in the sexual meaning of the word (though there is that) but more in that he takes in the world through his senses. Touch, smell, taste... he is a sybarite, a latent hedonist, and so pairing communication with scent and sensation is something that he responds to viscerally. The smells -- sweat, perfume, spices -- evokes their past sexual intimacy, not all of it unpleasant; the embrace, even if it isn't physical, provides the illusion of touch. Tremendously intimate touch, since it is mental, not something that he can simply push away or ignore. That, paired with the apology (even if it is a sideways one; she doesn't actually /say/ she's sorry, only ask if it would help) and the conscious statement that she is trying to be nice-- it tips the balance rather nicely.
And there's that guilt, too. Survivor's guilt. It makes him ultra-sensitive at this time of year, and prone to second-guessing himself. At the same time, it pushes him into more reckless action than he would otherwise be prone to. A mind-boggling thought, I know, when his normal lifestyle is hardly the type to inspire warm fuzzies in insurance brokers. But she's said the right words and he's morbidly sensitive enough to allow that he might -- just /might/ -- be a little unfair. And if he can't call a truce on this one day of all days, what the fuck? The entire city lays down the laurels for the NYPD and FDNY during this one day. The courtesy he can expect from criminals today is surely no less than what he can expect from this shining star of society, right? Right?
...Jesus. If I keep this up, I'm never going to finish this.
The door is unlocked, and inside the cool, dark interior, Emma is a puddle of muted light, misty gray layered over pale pink over pale and blemishless skin. She's pushed up against the far door, turned sideways on the seat, ankles crossed and folded to the side, hands in her lap. "At the ceremony?" she asks, perhaps needlessly, given the date and his dress. She slides a glance over the row of shiny little medals, and tucks a smile away.
The silt of memory answers before Rossi does, both unnecessary and hazed by weariness. "Yeah," he says, climbing in with uncharacteristic awkwardness. Unusual exercise, to conform his larger frame to a larger car. He sinks into the far corner of the seat with unsettled limbs, cautiously stretching over a space hitherto unexperienced. "Three things I'll wear dress blues for. You're looking good." Pedantic courtesy. His look follows the compliment, taking for granted the Frost polish.
Again, a pose that I like. Wow. This log is full of poses that I did that I actually like. You realize how rare that is? Diamond out of a duck's ass, man.
Again, a beautiful pose from Emma, very evocative: the muted light, the misty gray, the pink over pale skin. The player is a wonderful writer, and sometimes comes up with the most lovely images, which ... I squirrel away and then pop out at unexpected moments, like the prize in the cereal box. Not quite as cool as the original, but a pleasing copy, nonetheless! The issue of the medals (again with backstory) is that Emma has been stealing and returning his medals, bit by bit, at least at this point in time. They're like -- trophies, maybe. Or memorabilia? Little pieces of Chris's soul that she can hold onto and possess, I suppose, though I don't know that she imbues them with that much meaning. (Does she?) You really have to wonder about her feelings towards him.
I like the image of the 'silt of memory.' God knows it's been washed clean often enough by Emma's interference. There are times when I actually pay attention to the physicality that I claim I pose decently: this is one of those times, when what I'm posing actually makes sense. I'm surprised that I thought about this detail, in fact; it's uncharacteristic of me. Being naturally insensitive myself, I'm not usually aware of this kind of detail -- the awkwardness, the adjustment of habit when faced with a new situation. It's the sort of thing that Magneto always manages to bring out in his poses, which makes me crazy with envy. I've been trying to be more observant in real life, but there's a lifetime of habit there to overcome, so I'm afraid I can only report indifferent success.
Holy crap. A model just walked by my cube. Men should not be allowed to be that gorgeous without an airbrush.
Chris is a reverse snob, which is to say, he clings to his blue collar roots with a fierce pride and determination. Being in the lap of luxury is unsettling, and unnerving. He usually manages to carry through on a wave of hostility and sheer chutzpah and arrogance. Today, in a less truculent frame of mood, and faced with a woman he has no need to pretend for, he is simply and almost naively bemused.
"Ceremonies, charities, and...?" She accepts the compliment with a quirk of lip and brow and leans to rap a knuckle on the privacy glass risen between front and back. A moment later the car pulls away from the curb, bullying it's way back into the flow of traffic.
"Funerals, weddings and direct orders," Rossi counters, a hint of uncertainty smudging the mind's color while hands search for place to redistribute themselves. On the lap it is, then, the flat-topped cap balanced on a knee. Shoulders and spine set themselves gingerly against the seat back; trapped in luxury, he glowers sullenly at Emma, a wolf in a bow tie. His medals -- all of them -- gleam in the window's light. "More of the first than the second."
Such a disparity between their two lives. The first two things that leap to Emma's mind are a perfect reflection of her idea of formal occasions: impersonal ones, organized gatherings where the focus is a cause rather than an person. And in the converse, there's Chris, whose life is built around individuals rather than ideals. Funerals first -- there are so many more of those, especially of late -- and then weddings, two events that are the most significant in any person's life.... though not, perhaps, for Emma. The last one, direct orders, covers all the cases suggested by Emma but adds a different twist to them. Chris, ultimately, is a man under orders. He is a man who has, for all his alpha dog qualities, chosen to be subservient to someone else for the greater good. Emma-- let's just say subservience is not one of her defining qualities. Would she choose to be second to someone, say Jean, if it meant that a greater good would be fulfilled? If she knew it would mean being second forever?
Commentaries are funny. I read back over the stuff I'm saying and it sounds like we were being /so deep/ when we played this, but really, we weren't. It's just entertaining to call out the differences in worldview that are reflected in the way we play and portray our characters. There's two completely different levels of meaning in Emma and Rossi's answers. The uniform means something to Rossi, something personal and important. To Emma, I think to some extent she maybe views it as just another pretty suit in a wardrobe.
Emma refuses to be intimidated by his dark looks. As she leans back, she shifts, left shoulder digging into the seat back, left hand tucking under her thigh, right hand kept still and careful in her lap, left knee pulled up to the seat so her foot (bare foot, heels left on the floor on Rossi's side) hooks behind her right knee. Empathy settles heavily between them, offering nor seeking comfort, merely companionship.
Rossi's thoughts are more armored than mere prickles, more jagged than errant. Fractured by the day and the company, his silence is initially a thing wound tight, humming like a string drawn too taut. Empathy erodes the edges, blunting the uneven blades. After a time the stiff shoulders ease; a breath sighs out, flavored with rue. Companionship. Odd. Quaint. Surreal. But companionship, nonetheless.
I'm bad at posing to silence. I'm bad at posing silence. This doesn't mean I don't appreciate it! Chris normally doesn't handle silence well, at least of the kind that he doesn't make -- but the empathy makes the difference. Emma manipulates Chris rather well in this scene, though I don't know that it was really conscious or intended to be manipulation. By not pushing, by simply offering companionship, she lets him find his own space and relax into it, where thrusting unwanted emotional reaction on him would make him close tighter and grow more armored.
It doesn't hurt that she settles herself a little more informally in her seat. One of those small psychological tricks that Chris sometimes uses is to mirror another person's pose, not immediately, but in a vague sort of reflection: sometimes just in attitude rather than actual pose. It's one of those habitual things now, and so the way Emma just kicks off her heels and curls up makes him settle as well in an almost Pavlovian response. Not quite, but sort of. Funny how the tricks we use to manipulate other people can end up manipulating us.
I use the image of the tightly-tuned string a little too much. I blame my musician background. I really need to find another one.
Emma stretches her leg out, eyes and head dropping to consider her toes a moment before the foot falls back to the floor of the car and she settles deeper into the cushions and peeks back at him, tracing the lines of jaw and shoulder and chest through the veil of lashes, counting the medals hanging there. "How are you?" she asks quietly.
The fine-drawn mouth curves again, skirting a smile that is more honest than the last. "You tell me," Rossi says, failing at a sneer. He turns the cap in broad, capable hands, turning the wink of metal up to be smoothed by a thumb's pad. "I'm doing good, all things considered. Been better, but been a lot worse. You?" Awareness of her attention presses against his senses; he glances up to meet her gaze, green eyes hooded. "Still alive."
Such a throwaway question. "How are you?" is supposed to elicit the response, "Fine. You?" Between these two, though, it's a loaded question, and the answers are almost always different.
He answers honestly enough, by his lights. It's so far back now that I'm afraid I can't really remember what was going on in his life -- but it's Rossi, so what are the chances that things are going smoothly? Pretty remote. Now that I think about it, I believe this may actually be after the incident where she came to visit him at his apartment and asked him to investigate if she ever turned up missing. A curious thing to ask an apparent enemy, but Chris is a cop, if nothing else, and Emma knows well enough that he can be trusted to pursue things in the face of almost all opposition. The kinds of roadblocks that might be thrown up by the likes of Shaw and Magneto would simply be motivation on top of incentive.
I like props, though I'm hit or miss about remembering them. The cap is such a prop: I do a fairly good job of remembering it until near the end, when it sort of fades into nowhere. But as part of his uniform, and as a thing that he doesn't really wear all that often anymore, he's fairly conscious of it. It brings back memories, does that hat: nostalgia of the days when he was a beat cop and life was /easy/.
A clean white line runs up the middle of her scalp, hair smoothed down and coiled into a low-sitting bun at the nape of her neck. She lifts her head to meet his gaze squarely, blue eyes flashing like shattered glass in the sunlight in defiance of his own guardedness. "There's something to be said for that. Survival is an underrated talent." She steals another glance at the rows of ribbon marching across his shoulder, and amusement creeps into her expression. "You never did show me all of your medals."
"You had them. You could've looked all you wanted," Rossi says, flicking a fingernail's crescent against the whisper of ribbon, and glances down. A pang escapes the closed mind, flitting like a small dagger through his ward before being captured and stuffed back behind the eyes. He exhales a sharp, self-mocking snort. "And after all that, I lost one anyway. This one's Vic's. His widow lent it to me for the services."
I mention this because it struck me at the time. That picture of the white line up the middle of her scalp. I don't know why it sticks with me, but it does; it's one of those tiny little details about other people that I always notice unconsciously but never actually makes it into my RP. Magneto's player is really good at bringing that into his poses. Emma apparently is too. I should learn.
Medals. That private joke between them, though more on her side than on his. One of them is still missing at this juncture, and Emma is the one who has it -- though Rossi doesn't know that, actually. Thus the replacement medal, borrowed from a family member.
Like I said, the uniform means something to him, as do the medals themselves. He has a strong connection with tradition and with his past; Vic, I determined on a whim, was a cousin who served as the kind of older brother figure that younger Chris should have had but never really did: a role model of sorts who died when Chris was old enough to understand what that meant. He's much older now, and the memory of the emotional attachment has faded enough that that's not really what causes that pang; rather, it's the leap of association from dead cousin cop to dead 9/11 cops to his own survival that prompts that little stab of emotion. It's not clear in the pose, which I think I did deliberately: no need to be obvious, after all, and emotions are rarely so clear-cut that we can trace them back to the exact source and the exact stimulus that prompts them.
I speculate why Emma finds them so fascinating. Not only because they're shiny and colorful, and because they're important to Rossi, but I think maybe because they're part of a narrative, stories about a life that's really very alien to the one that Emma leads. They're like little windows into something that's probably been a mostly closed book to her. What does the rich and pampered Emma Frost know about day-to-day self-sacrifice by normal, ordinary homo sapiens who lack telepathic power and still put the little they have on the line? Then again, it could be just because they're shiny and colorful. I do not know! Emma's player will have to explain it.
Emma leans toward him, toward the medals, curiosity peeling away a layer of formality. "Looking isn't the same as being shown. I don't know the stories behind them, for example." Her hands remain, for the moment, safely in her lap and tucked under her leg. She looks up. "Who was Vic?"
The dead man's shape sketches itself in shades of blue, black and green -- the Rossi colors -- before the voice puts a framework of identity around it. "Cousin Vic," Chris says, hand sliding across the little ribbon. "Out in Harlem. Got nailed by a drunk driver hit-and-run while serving a ticket. Walked away, and then had some kind of aneurysm and dropped dead two days later in the middle of dinner. -- They're just bits of metal and ribbon," he adds, veiling discomfort with dismissal. The finger flicks again. Plink. "Shiny. For the chicks."
Hah. And in fact, Emma goes ahead and asks, though it may be for sheer conversational purposes rather than real interest. The way she asks, though, seems like real interest. And Rossi ... responds to that by telling her the truth, instead of putting her off with hostility for prying into something that is, after all, somewhat personal. He tells Vic's story, rather than the medal's: of the two, it is the other man's life and the inconsequentiality of his death that is significant, rather than the triviality that resulted in both of them being awarded the same medal / commendation. Don't ask me which one it is, because I couldn't for the life of me tell you.
Having given her blunt fact, he promptly slides into flippancy. This is, I have concluded, the way that he reacts to anything that might touch too closely onto real feeling. He is embarrassed by honest emotion, at least insofar as he is concerned and response to him might be concerned; his dread of pity or sympathy is sincere, and given any situation where he might end up the recipient of it, however tangentially, he promptly diverts and deflects to make it clear that there's no need.
I like the way I wrote that, the sketching of colors and the framework of identity, mind and voice harmonizing together.
"For the chicks," Emma echoes dryly, rebuffed mentally and physically. She looks up and away, out of the window to gauge their progress.
<< For the widows, >> Rossi says in silence, forgetting. "Worked on you," he says lightly, aloud. Plink. He slouches down into the seat, a hand smoothing over the upholstery with a sensualist's pleasure. Grudging. His hand idles at another bit of metal and ribbon, the forebrain automatically identifying by the shape of it under fingers, where sight is turned towards the passing scenery. Purple Shield. Injury taken in the line of duty.
I'm not entirely sure here about Emma's pose. Rebuffed physically -- by the finger flick? Or does she mean that she retreats physically? And mentally ... that I'm not entirely sure about either. Is it the flippancy that pushes her back? Or the memory of the dead man itself? Does she have the nicety of mind to draw back from stepping on what might be sensitive ground unnecessarily?
My answering pose is a little unclear. For a moment Rossi forgets that Emma is a telepath and can hear his thoughts, so under the flippancy the unspooling of real thought continues. 'For the widows' is for Vic's widow, who lent him the medal, but also for the widows of the men who died in 9/11. There were a lot.
Aloud, he continues to deflect, inviting Emma to keep to shallow waters by being a little provoking, if not seriously. For all he mocks the importance of the medals, they're important enough to him that he knows the shape of them under his fingers. Not necessarily because he's proud of them, so much as they are sort of waystones by which he tracks the path of his life. Each medal is like his scars, in a less indelible way; he remembers the stories and the occasions, and can point to one and say, "I was there, doing this. I was /that/ person."
He's gotten more than one Purple Shield.
Emma steals a quick glance at the officer as the thought slip free of lowering guards. Then she sits back, both shoulders meeting the same upholstery he fondles, though with much less notice or appreciation. "/You/ worked on me. Your medals were beside the point," she mutters, apparently to the air.
Amusement is freer for that, spun out of the ashes of his mood into silver thread. "Flattery," Chris says dryly, "will get you nowhere. You've already gotten pretty much everything there is to get. There's nothing left." His elbow settles into the armrest; fisted into its support, his head turns to attend on Emma. "You tell Shaw we slept together?"
For such an arrogant guy, Chris is ... weirdly humble. It isn't so much that he has low self-esteem, because he doesn't, exactly; he's well aware of the effect that he has (or can have) on women, and has been cheerfully willing to exploit it in the past. But somehow-- it's all very shallow and false to him, like a game that grown-ups play when they're bored. There isn't and there has never been any real investment or meaning attached to it, so when Emma says that /he/ worked on her, he doesn't take it seriously. Which is unfortunate, because if he had -- if she meant it (did she?) -- something really different could've happened between them. Maybe. Or maybe not. But certainly there would be some better understanding reached there, laid in for the future.
He means it when he tells her she has already gotten everything there is to get. In that he devalues the importance of his opinion, I think, and how highly it can be weighed by people who know him. Again, that weird humility. He doesn't value his own respect for other people, or his emotional perceptions of other people, because -- those things are irrelevent in the grand scheme of things, I suppose. He views her reply as acceptance of his attempt to move on from serious matters to trivial flipancy. And now, since we're talking about unimportant shit, let's talk about Shaw.
"Not everything," she says reproachfully, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. The coil of hair loosens and slips. Her elbow finds the curve of door handle designed to receive it, and a flicker of discomfort ghosts across her unguarded expression. "Maybe. I don't know. Why?"
"Everything I'm willing to give. I could swear--" Chris begins, slouching into his arm. Even the car's long body is inadequate for that physicality, poked by the reminder of Shaw into febrile, feral life. It yawns; it wakes, uncoiling to stretch. Rossi shrugs, a murmur of aggression like charcoal across his thoughts. "Maybe it's nothing."
Liar. He wasn't willing to give what she got to begin with. It's a falsehood, a white lie made for the sake of an illusion of control. He knows it, she knows it, so really, why bother? Some habits are hard to break. Emma writes in her comentary that what she wants is his respect, his affection, his -- emotions, I guess. A lot of Emma is is wrapped up in that need to be loved, I think. (Disclaimer: I do not play Emma, so really? I am just talking out my ass when I make these random statements about her. It is Emma according to Rossi's player. Tough. My commentary, my thoughts.) Chris is capable of love, certainly, and of strong emotional ties -- he can be incredibly loyal and makes an incredible friend if you get that far, though his casual, occasional kindness to complete strangers is pretty potent in and of itself -- so I don't know. It would certainly be a challenge to win over that defensiveness, so there's that appeal, but I surmise that there is more to it. Simply calling him a challenge is a convenient white lie, like Rossi's, and prevents Emma from lifting the covers to look at anything uglier or more compelling underneath. Forgiveness for what she did; understanding, acceptance, respect from someone that maybe she does actually admire from a certain perspective--
And then we go back to Shaw.
Look at the dog make himself look big. Seriously. Men. Reading this reminds me that Rossi has been so much more subdued lately; he's moving slower, less restless, his physicality has been more self-contained and less prone to expression. He still reaches out for physical contact, but he stays safe, not expanding his personal space significantly. It's a fairly important shift in his personality, though it's come on him gradually.
Emma wrote in her commentary that her character was rather pleased at what she perceived as jealousy. What Rossi and Shaw have isn't jealousy over her, though -- at least, from Shaw's perspective it might have been. What Chris has is simple and uncomplicated antipathy. There are times when two people will meet each other and simply spark the wrong way. This is what happened with Chris and Shaw. Two very alpha men, both very physical, both inclined to be controlling, both fairly ruthless in their own ways. Shaw's willing to go further than Chris is (the Jehovah's witness incident proved that) but Chris also has and has had something that Shaw wanted: namely, Emma's interest, completely outside of material benefits to be gained. It isn't about Emma at all, really. It's about /mine/. On Chris's side, Emma doesn't even enter it at all. It's probably just as well that Emma not know that.
Emma opens her eyes to razor thin slits and looks at him out of the corner of her eye, attention drawn and fascinated by the glimpses into the stirring maw, a morbid curiosity tempted into poking, perhaps unwisely. "What?"
Rossi grins into silence, a hard, fast flash as unforgiving as any of Shaw's best. Jehovah's witnesses; a gun and the fear of Magneto. It isn't God, but it will do. "Doesn't matter," he says aloud, masculine antagonism reveling in the demural. Alpha dog hostility. "Never could see what women saw in him. Damnedest thing. --How are you?" he adds, focusing the entirety of his attention -- his interest -- on Emma. Eyes pluck sharply at her polished exterior, discarding it with an unflattering abruptness. "You still worried?"
Emma snorts in sudden illumination and manages to keep the accompanying smirk from her face. She bends her head forward, and looks down at the fingers in her lap. They roll a diamond-pocked tennis bracelet around her wrist. "Of course. It keeps me on guard."
Oh. Right. Magneto and Rossi scared some of Shaw's boys. That was fun!
I don't know exactly what to say here. There isn't a great deal. Holy crap. We might actually make it past a round with less than a novel.
The dark brow draws together, furrowing -- but it is a token frown, amusement still fanged and heavy-pawed on the earlier thought. "Keeps you entertained?" Rossi asks easily, skimming his wrist over leather (like his lost overcoats, the wistful thought murmurs. Fucking Magneto. Have to buy a new--) on its way to setting the hat on the seat beside him. "Stressful way to live."
"I suppose. It is thrilling in it's own way," she shrugs audibly, turning her head to look at him over the curve of a gray clad shoulder. "No more so than your own line of work."
"Life and death?" and this time the mockery is real, self-directed and sardonic. Rossi digs his foot into the floor of the car, bracing his long-legged seat into the cushions. "What's the point? What do you get out of it?"
I find it rather funny that I just told Emma's player that her character was endearing when she was about to pull a fast one on someone, like a "big, feral cat," especially in light of my pose above. Emma is definitely cat-like in a lot of ways, so the amusement that she prompts from time to time reflects that. Lo, how I remember the presence of the prop. I give myself points.
The problem with asking questions like "What do you get out of it?" is that sometimes, just sometimes, the question can boomerang back at you. With the majority of people, though, Chris banks on the self-interest and self-absorption that will take that question and carry it on into other areas of the other person's life and thoughts. Open-ended questions are the key: not questions that can be answered with 'yes' or 'no,' but questions that need full sentences to answer them, actual arrangements of words that lead to a progressive narrative.
The self-directed mockery is complicated. There's a lot in it: there's the awareness of his own survivor's guilt, and a general contempt at himself for having it; there's a rub of acknowledgment about his own idealism, normally covered and carefully buried; there's a memory of his seeming inability to stay out of trouble and go charging into ridiculously dangerous situations simply because he can't stay out of them-- all things that he personally finds contemptible about himself, but taken as a totality, sort of form the bedrock of his character.
"Safety, power, revenge... You know. What every girl wants," Emma answers, matching mockery with sweet scorn.
Curiosity, rarely far under the surface, bumps against the flatscan discipline to worry at the reply. "Power," says Rossi, who flicks his gaze around the interior of the car. The word echoes in the mind, caustic. << How much is enough? >> "Not the same thing as control, anyway. Nothing's /safe/. Revenge?"
Power is a pretty empty thing insofar as Rossi is concerned. What constitutes real power? Power over life and death? He has that, to a certain extent. Power over a person's life? Emma has just about the most complete power there imaginable: telepathy, and of a type that she's willing to use to get her own way. And at what point is it enough? He's been in board rooms and high society homes as much as he's been in the bodegas and the alleys, and dead people are still dead people and the perps are still perps, regardless of their jobs or their influence. He's not naive enough not to recognize that the Law can often take a backseat to the influence wielded by the most powerful, but those people are pretty rare, and he's just uncynical enough to believe that eventually it all comes back to bite them in the ass in one way or another.
That Emma is scornful about the reply doesn't negate the possibility that she's telling the truth, or at least a fraction of the truth. He takes it at face value, regardless, and throws it back at her.
Emma purses her lips, her eyes growing narrow and dark as she tuts. "What do you want to hear, Detective? My tragic history, complete with poverty and perhaps abandonment? My rescue by a savior who turns out to be the devil himself? Perhaps a little bit of the penitent sinner?" she purrs, spinng truth and lie together on an insubstantial merry-go-round. "Or maybe you'd /rather/ I were the 'woman terrible, with justice in one hand and vengeance in the other.'"
"You can read my mind." Heavy lids slide to, stained-glass green deepening in turn. "You tell /me/."
Emma brushes telepathic fingers past the cob-webbed interiors of his thoughts, much like a puff of air on the back of his neck. And then she smiles, scimitar-slashed and edged. "Do you always need your women to order you around?"
Chris flinches. There is no hiding it; the recoil at that light touch proves more than even discipline can hobble. "Fuck you," he says, harsh, and then, blank, "Need -- what? I'm Italian. We like strong women."
Haha. Emma's reply. It's suited to look like scorn and contempt, but it sort of isn't quite. Not enough to entirely fool Chris, though he doesn't actually say so; he suspects the grain of truth in there, and doesn't follow it because -- well, because there's a sort of unspoken truce happening here, isn't there? Emma promised to be nice. And he, perhaps a little belatedly but nonetheless, he takes a semi-polite step back and does not pick at it like he might otherwise. He recognizes that bitterness and inclination towards mockery because he uses it himself. Can't cheat a cheater. In this one regard, they're cats of the same stripe.
Then there's the line about strong women. There's a miscommunication here. I like miscommunications in RP. Perfect communication is so -- inhuman, and so artificial. I like it when there's a disconnect, where two characters sort of pass like ships in the night and are left going, huh? at the end of the trip.
Chris's retort, 'you tell /me/,' isn't meant as a directive, as in 'you tell me what to think.' It's a challenge. He knows what he's thinking; the question that he's asking is, figure out what I'm thinking. It's his invitation to her to carry on this line of conversation if she wants. She takes him up on it, but not quite in the way that he expects, and certainly not in the way that he understands his invitation to mean; her misunderstanding is that he is suggesting she actually tell him what to think, which is an understandable misconstruction to make on his words, especially for someone who is used to, well, telling people what to think.
He should really be careful about what he says to a telepath. A colloquialism can take on a whole new and entirely unexpected meaning when the person you're talking to can actually do what you're suggesting she do. Also, Emma totally stole that from me. Scimitar-slashed and edged. SHE DID. Considering how much I steal from her, I take it as a compliment.
The knee-jerk reaction of telling her to fuck off is -- you know, my character swears a /lot/ -- a reaction to the telepathic intrusion rather than to her suggestion that he needs women to order him around. I think that's pretty clear, but just to make sure. He's frankly baffled, and again, we have a misunderstanding; she doesn't get what he's saying, he doesn't get what she's saying, and in general there's this, "have we changed the subject?" sort of bewilderment on his side. It's true that he respects strong women, and in fact, /needs/ strong women in his life. In general, Rossi women are strong. They have to be: their men would run roughshod over them otherwise, and weak women simply do not survive in the rough and tumble environment of a Rossi family household. Not long term, anyway.
A lot of Chris's short-lived relationships were short because his girlfriends were weak, or rather, more passive-aggressive than simply aggressive. He lacks the patience to deal with a passive-aggressive personality in his daily life. Directness is key, with him; though he is capable of surprising subtlety when he chooses, it takes a while for him to develop enough respect or caring for somebody to make that effort. (Outside of the job, that is.) Any woman who expects him off the bat to cater to her roundabout, convoluted "I'm from Planet Venus" communication style is doomed to disappointment.
Now I'm totally off track. Back to the story in progress.
"As I recall..." Emma replies, looking upwards in false thought and letting her voice trail off suggestively. Then her eyes swivel back to him, orbs of liquid sapphire in a marble cut face. "I suppose everyone has to have their excuses."
Bemusement deepens, ruffling the foyer of the detective's mind. "The hell?" Chris slaps back, more puzzled than angry. Hostility expires, unbalanced. A leg draws up to become a hatstand to the roving flip of cap. "You're cracked, Frost," he decides -- and then grins, with a moment's rare, unfettered grace. Boyish. Unshadowed. "You like this in the boardroom?"
Chris is a little knocked off balance because it's clear that there's some other conversation that took place here, at least in Emma's mind, but he ... wasn't part of it. Although she seems to think he was. He has an appreciation of the ridiculous, even when he's a part of it, so the strange sideways shift brings out his sense of humor, a rare glimpse of how he is and can be when he isn't threatened and when he's with his mates. There's an opportunity there, a small gap in the wall where Emma could have carried on and they could have been almost -- not quite, but /almost/ -- companionable, in a lighter, less tension-ridden way.
I used the word foyer there, but what I apparently meant was vestibule, which is the entryway of churches and cathedrals. Damn. When we did the Windex log, Chris's mind was compared to a cathedral, which tied back into his past as a man of God. I /meant/ to call back to it, but I failed. FAILED. Vocabulary, why do you fail me? I did get the word 'grace' right, though, so I give myself half-points.
The prop does not, however. Hello, hat!
"Better." Challenge layers and wraps around her tone, echoed in another breath of telepathic power rippling across his mind. She turns away and straightens. "But I told you. You have safe passage. I'll sheath my claws if they're too scary for you."
This time the detective manages not to wince, but it is a close thing; old scars throb under that touch, blossoming back to ugly, remembered bruises repressed by will. "Woman of your word," Rossi says, smile fading with the too-short second of peace. Eyes glitter. "Nothing to see here. Move along, Frost. You'll find more interesting brains in your high-powered meetings -- but then again, you have a taste for blue collar cuisine, don't you?"
But of course, Emma has to remind him again who and what she is, and by extension what she did to him, and so that closes that opening for the rest of the trip, at least until the very end when he's ready to leave. While they manage to be more or less civil to each other for the remainder of the ride, there's still that wall between them, though earnest hostility is left behind in the face of more demanding curiosity.
Paths not taken! I'm curious what would have happened if they'd been able to actually set aside their past for a little while. Maybe some other time--
"Interest is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?" she snips back, tugging the hem of her skirt to straighten the line running across her knees, then smoothing away a crease.
For a span of heartbeats, Rossi makes no reply. His thoughts slip like silver fish through speculation, interrogation, the currents of logic and cynical experience. "I don't get you," he admits at last, gaze settled thoughtfully on the delicate, graceful profile. "What's your story? Most people I can figure out, eventually, but you're -- what gives?"
Emma laughs, merriment bubbling on the breath of exasperation. "I'm an enigma? That is a rather lovely thought. Most men don't take the time to try and figure /me/ out. Just how to get me," she replies, dancing around the question.
I stole that silver fish line from -- I don't remember. Windex RP? Anyway, I stole it from Emma. Fair's fair.
Chris recognizes quite clearly that she hasn't answered his question, but then again, he has no real expectation that she would. The fact that he is more curious than hostile after that jab of telepathy is a good thing (or a bad thing, depending on your point of view). Her squirming away from questions is enough to prick the detective in him, less from the criminal instinct perspective than from the sheer people perspective. Chris is a people person, in the sense that he has an abiding and entrenched fascination and curiosity about how and why people do the things they do, how they work, how they think, what motivates them. It's part of what makes him a good cop, but it's a personal trait that carries beyond law.
A lot of victims feel the need to put logic behind the acts that made them victims; senselessness of crime is almost as bad as the act itself. Chris is luckier (hah!) than most, in that he knows perfectly well what the reason behind the crime was. Given the same situation, he grants that it's possible that he might have acted to protect his people, though certainly not in the same way, even with the same powers. (Easy for him to say, lacking the tools and the experience that shapes the way people use those tools.) What he doesn't have is understanding of the person who did it to him. In this sense, he is unluckier than most victims; other people do not have to face their violator again and again in the course of daily -- or at least, routine -- life, without recourse to justice or a reasonable expectation of safety. Every time he runs into Emma, to a certain extent it's like being violated again.
As a guy from a very macho background and a cop who is used to being the aggressor and has no real experience or familarity with being the victim, he doesn't really have the personal tools to deal with that. So what he does instead is the Chris equivalent of denial; he makes Emma's character into a case instead, a mystery that is meant to be solved. It sets things at a remove, just one more file in his stack of open cases that has nothing to do with having your mind raped and rewritten.
I don't think Chris finds Emma an /enigma/. Which is to say, she has certain behavior patterns that he can readily understand and that he's seen many many times before. Most people are not really surprising, when you've been around and met as many types as Chris has. But there's still that something there, which sort of defies the persona. He's curious about that, about the 'what might have been' that's still living under the covers somewhere.
In retrospect, Chris would be a very dangerous telepath. That curiosity of his would probably make for a truly bad combination.
Holy crap. It's too long for one post. Uh. Guess it needs two!
Continued in Part II