OOC - Five Years Commentary (Part II)
Log: Five Years
Date: 9/11/06
Players: Emma & Rossi
Continued from the first half
"Already had you," Rossi points out, before amending with a twist of accent, "Or did you have me? It count if I thought you were someone else? You keep popping up. What do you want from me?" Exasperation meets exasperation, without the buffer of humor.
Emma shrugs. "Doesn't count, I think, for either of us. And there's the typical man I knew was lurking in there. Automatically assuming 'getting' someone has sexual connotations." She looks askance and shakes her head. "Is it important to know?"
Not an entirely fair retort, Emma! Since she suggested men were always taking the time to try to /get/ her, and of course from a male perspective (since she's speaking of the male perspective) of course it would be the sexual. He gives her the answer on that front, since she put the concept on that level.
Chris says, "I don't like questions without answers." And tacks on with mordant accusation, "You know that." << --know /me/, >> trails the unhappy, uneasy realization. Shoulders hunch under the finely seamed uniform. Medals blink.
A bit of the shell cracks, and Emma simply blinks at him before turning to face out of the window, frowning deeper as she shifts to lean her weight on her elbow. "I didn't plan today," she says sullenly.
"You stopped," Chris points out, sitting forward to pin his elbows on his knees. The hat shuffles down his lap, pinched between torso and thigh, a jaunty wedge for the lean frame. Hands fold under the jut of chin. << Weird, >> he says then, fumbling after old lessons to mold unfamiliar speech. << I always thought -- when I thought about it at all -- that telepathy would be ... honest. >>
We hurtle headlong into a different misunderstanding, though that doesn't really happen until the next round. It starts here, with what Chris says. Emma takes it personally, I think. Reading between the lines in her commentary, it sounds like she feels that Chris is attacking Emma specifically, accusing her of being a liar. Which -- is not entirely the case. When Emma tells Chris that she didn't plan today, Chris accepts that as truth. The sullenness, which is somewhat out of character for the polished persona that Emma tends to present, that gives her away a bit. Given that sharing, he shares a little on his own: gives a little, because she gives a little, but moving to a telepathic communication that he finds both awkward and painful. In short, he opens himself to her, and pays for it in the next pose.
Human beings are inherently prone to misunderstanding. It is an awesome thing.
Backtracking to the poses before that: Chris answers her question about why he wants to know with a bit of diversion of his own. It isn't false that Chris doesn't like questions without answers; it just isn't the whole truth. He has a penchant for asking deceptively simple questions that require incredibly complicated answers, and given that, it's sort of ironic that he doesn't like questions without answers. If he really didn't like them, he shouldn't ask them, should he?
It bothers Chris that Emma knows him. Like, /really/ knows him. (Although parenthetically, I don't know that she really /does/. I've said it before, but seeing something isn't the same thing as understanding, and given the massive chasm of understanding that often seems to open up between the two, it should be pretty obvious to Chris that she doesn't -- BUT HE DOESN'T SEEM TO CATCH ON. Possibly he is not entirely clear-eyed where this issue is concerned.) He claims to be an open book, a straightforward, simple guy with no real secrets, but when push comes to shove he's got a lot going on under the surface, and he really is a very private person.
If you can imagine it, it's like that morning after you have a drunk night out with someone and end up telling them all your private, most embarrassing secrets. That shock of realizing you told them /that/ and you'll have to face them eventually instead of digging a hole 6 feet deep that you can crawl into? Awful. Awful awful awful.
Not that I would know anything about that.
<< It is. It's the people that disappoint, >> Emma snaps back, driving the words home with an ungentle force composed of resentment and bitterness. "Go find Grey if you want a saint, Detective. I don't aspire to the job."
Scars crack and bleed at that roughness, thin skin stretched too fine and tight to yawn further. "Fuck," Rossi breathes, inhaling a shaky lungful of air, and white rims green -- but he is a stubborn man. << Saint, >> the bloodied reply carps, tired. << I don't know whose expectations you're trying to disappoint, Frost, but they're not mine. >>
<< Of course they're not yours. You don't have any of your own, >> Emma accuses, a flash of his face, his voice totally at odds with any memory that she /should/ have, flares brightly, then fades. Emma hunches defensively in her corner, staring stubbornly out of the widow as they turn onto the street the station is located on.
And there's the retaliation, where she slaps back and opens old injuries -- for no reason that Chris can readily understand, being unfamiliar with the real ins and outs of Emma's self-esteem and self-image. It strikes me that she's weirdly sensitive on this front; it seems like even though she has contempt for Jean, to some extent she does compare herself -- unfavorably, at that -- with the pure image that Jean has, and maybe, just maybe, feels she doesn't measure up. There's a sense of living up to the negative image there, like a child who is told she's not trying hard enough, so goes off in a huff and decides fine, if people think she's lazy, she'll be the /laziest lazy person ever/. And /then/ they'll be sorry.
It's Shakespearean, really. "Why, I in this weak piping time of peace
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days."
-Richard III
SEE?
What Chris was saying about telepathy being honest wasn't about Emma being dishonest, but rather about how telepathy doesn't actually show everything or explain everything. He's moving there towards an awareness, however vague, that Emma doesn't really /know/ him in the way that he expects her to. He's saying that he thought ultimate truth and ultimate understanding between people would be possible with telepathy. He never factored into it the human component.
He's bewildered and he's battered, but he's determined -- and he still searches for understanding, even if it isn't forthcoming. He'll lay seeds for later, maybe. And /saint/, of all words, not to mention the reference to Jean Grey-- well, he remembers what happened when he mentioned Jean to Emma the first time, so it's a safe bet that there're some ... well, issues there. To put it mildly. To accuse Rossi of looking for a saint is beyond ridiculous, and Chris knows it, and so would Emma if it was really about him.
Chris doesn't know about the body swap issue yet, so the kick of memory that Emma shares doesn't quite register for what it is. He assumes it's the reverse of what it really is; that she's seeing from his memories rather than the other way around, though how that makes real sense when she shows it from Storm's perspective is -- well, complicated. He doesn't really /understand/ telepathy.
The entire search for the outside perspectives on Emma is another thing that she misunderstood. Hampered by the loss of her telepathy, it makes sense that she would be paranoid and automatically suspect the worst from any and every situation.
Silence fumbles with the tatters of imagery, tentative with his voice through other people's ears. Familiar unfamiliarity. << Expectations I got, >> Rossi manages at last, tracking memory to its source. << You want me to be fair? I can't. So I went for a second opinion. >> His mouth curves, edges thinning to a passing rue. "I should've asked Chuck."
"Xavier." Emma snorts. "/He/ is the worst one of the lot. He rather enjoy being the reluctant hero."
"And what are you?" The spoken word, flat and blunt. "The villain of the piece?"
"Don't you know darling," Emma positively purrs, looking across the seat at him. "The villain is always the most interesting one." The car slows and begins to negotiate for a piece of clear sideway.
It takes him a few seconds to figure out what's going on. He doesn't apologize. He has nothing to apologize for. Going to other people to find out their perspectives on things, to get their statements, is standard operating procedure for a cop working on a case. And Emma is a case, no more, no less. Really. REALLY.
He moves out of telepathy into the vocal because it hurts. The tear of scar tissue is bleeding into his mind, and it needs to reheal. Safer to speak aloud.
Lips twist askew, gaze smudging dark. Rossi glances out the window; reclaims his cap and places it, straight, on his head. "I'm not your victim, Frost," he says, knuckle sliding thoughtlessly across its curved brim. He glances aside to meet blue eyes with green. "I'm not your hero, either."
"I would have thought /that/ was obvious, Chris," she replies tartly, granting him his name at the last.
I like my pose there, the smudge of shadow and the return of the cap. He's preparing to become the role again, getting his costume and his persona together. I'm slowing down. It's late! I'm tired! (This is a long commentary!) But given the cliche roles that Emma has cast for herself and Xavier, there are only a few characters left: namely, the victim, the sidekick, the minion-- he refuses the role of victim, just as he refuses the role of hero, which is a callback to how the log actually started, not to mention the pick-up line that Emma used to get to him in Windex.
He's not a sidekick either, though he doesn't mention that, and he's definitely not a minion. Basically, he's saying that he's outside the game, whatever the game might be that these crazy mutants are playing, so count him out. She can deal with him as Chris, but not as a pawn in their stupid contest.
And she answers him with his name, for the first time. And not just by name, but with his real name, not the /Christopher/ that she usually uses, but Chris, acknowledgment of his real self.
She earns an honest smile for that, a tarnished reflection of the younger man banked in Storm's memories. Untouched by sin, by cynicism and by pain. Emma's gift. Oh well. "Thanks for the ride, Emma." The door opens to a draft's gust, spilling in city air and street noise. Rossi touches his cap in salute. "Stay alive."
Emma inhales sharply, and he exits on a look of confused nostalgia, surprised out of her by the association she hadn't realized was buried so deeply in shared experiences untouched and avoided in a cranny of her mind.
He, at any rate, does not see it. His attention is turned outward, forward, back to the station that waits for his return. Straight-backed and settled, rearmored and rearmed, Det. Rossi climbs the stairs to his home and disappears inside.
Almost done. Thank God for that.
I'm not a big fan of the first of the two poses in that round -- it rings a bit clunky, though there are some not entirely awful bits to it. I did not play fair, here; since Emma brought out the Storm memories, I gave them back to her, giving her a moment there where Storm encountered the memory-wiped Chris.
And of course, Emma takes that and turns it into a gorgeous pose. I just love those first two phrases: 'Emma inhales sharply, and he exits on a look of confused nostalgia--' There's just something about the way that she constructed those two that is awesome.
It's so rare that Chris gets called his real name by the mutants who dog him. It's a strange and silly way to please him, but being called Christopher really bugs him, which (of course) is why they do it. Stupid though it sounds, it's dehumanizing; the condescension of it continues to rub him raw, and as long as that continues, he isn't really willing to deal one-on-one with any of them.
And now I'm so totally done with commentary. If something else occurs to me, I'll go back and edit, but there's no brainpower left. None. All gone.....
Date: 9/11/06
Players: Emma & Rossi
Continued from the first half
"Already had you," Rossi points out, before amending with a twist of accent, "Or did you have me? It count if I thought you were someone else? You keep popping up. What do you want from me?" Exasperation meets exasperation, without the buffer of humor.
Emma shrugs. "Doesn't count, I think, for either of us. And there's the typical man I knew was lurking in there. Automatically assuming 'getting' someone has sexual connotations." She looks askance and shakes her head. "Is it important to know?"
Not an entirely fair retort, Emma! Since she suggested men were always taking the time to try to /get/ her, and of course from a male perspective (since she's speaking of the male perspective) of course it would be the sexual. He gives her the answer on that front, since she put the concept on that level.
Chris says, "I don't like questions without answers." And tacks on with mordant accusation, "You know that." << --know /me/, >> trails the unhappy, uneasy realization. Shoulders hunch under the finely seamed uniform. Medals blink.
A bit of the shell cracks, and Emma simply blinks at him before turning to face out of the window, frowning deeper as she shifts to lean her weight on her elbow. "I didn't plan today," she says sullenly.
"You stopped," Chris points out, sitting forward to pin his elbows on his knees. The hat shuffles down his lap, pinched between torso and thigh, a jaunty wedge for the lean frame. Hands fold under the jut of chin. << Weird, >> he says then, fumbling after old lessons to mold unfamiliar speech. << I always thought -- when I thought about it at all -- that telepathy would be ... honest. >>
We hurtle headlong into a different misunderstanding, though that doesn't really happen until the next round. It starts here, with what Chris says. Emma takes it personally, I think. Reading between the lines in her commentary, it sounds like she feels that Chris is attacking Emma specifically, accusing her of being a liar. Which -- is not entirely the case. When Emma tells Chris that she didn't plan today, Chris accepts that as truth. The sullenness, which is somewhat out of character for the polished persona that Emma tends to present, that gives her away a bit. Given that sharing, he shares a little on his own: gives a little, because she gives a little, but moving to a telepathic communication that he finds both awkward and painful. In short, he opens himself to her, and pays for it in the next pose.
Human beings are inherently prone to misunderstanding. It is an awesome thing.
Backtracking to the poses before that: Chris answers her question about why he wants to know with a bit of diversion of his own. It isn't false that Chris doesn't like questions without answers; it just isn't the whole truth. He has a penchant for asking deceptively simple questions that require incredibly complicated answers, and given that, it's sort of ironic that he doesn't like questions without answers. If he really didn't like them, he shouldn't ask them, should he?
It bothers Chris that Emma knows him. Like, /really/ knows him. (Although parenthetically, I don't know that she really /does/. I've said it before, but seeing something isn't the same thing as understanding, and given the massive chasm of understanding that often seems to open up between the two, it should be pretty obvious to Chris that she doesn't -- BUT HE DOESN'T SEEM TO CATCH ON. Possibly he is not entirely clear-eyed where this issue is concerned.) He claims to be an open book, a straightforward, simple guy with no real secrets, but when push comes to shove he's got a lot going on under the surface, and he really is a very private person.
If you can imagine it, it's like that morning after you have a drunk night out with someone and end up telling them all your private, most embarrassing secrets. That shock of realizing you told them /that/ and you'll have to face them eventually instead of digging a hole 6 feet deep that you can crawl into? Awful. Awful awful awful.
Not that I would know anything about that.
<< It is. It's the people that disappoint, >> Emma snaps back, driving the words home with an ungentle force composed of resentment and bitterness. "Go find Grey if you want a saint, Detective. I don't aspire to the job."
Scars crack and bleed at that roughness, thin skin stretched too fine and tight to yawn further. "Fuck," Rossi breathes, inhaling a shaky lungful of air, and white rims green -- but he is a stubborn man. << Saint, >> the bloodied reply carps, tired. << I don't know whose expectations you're trying to disappoint, Frost, but they're not mine. >>
<< Of course they're not yours. You don't have any of your own, >> Emma accuses, a flash of his face, his voice totally at odds with any memory that she /should/ have, flares brightly, then fades. Emma hunches defensively in her corner, staring stubbornly out of the widow as they turn onto the street the station is located on.
And there's the retaliation, where she slaps back and opens old injuries -- for no reason that Chris can readily understand, being unfamiliar with the real ins and outs of Emma's self-esteem and self-image. It strikes me that she's weirdly sensitive on this front; it seems like even though she has contempt for Jean, to some extent she does compare herself -- unfavorably, at that -- with the pure image that Jean has, and maybe, just maybe, feels she doesn't measure up. There's a sense of living up to the negative image there, like a child who is told she's not trying hard enough, so goes off in a huff and decides fine, if people think she's lazy, she'll be the /laziest lazy person ever/. And /then/ they'll be sorry.
It's Shakespearean, really. "Why, I in this weak piping time of peace
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days."
-Richard III
SEE?
What Chris was saying about telepathy being honest wasn't about Emma being dishonest, but rather about how telepathy doesn't actually show everything or explain everything. He's moving there towards an awareness, however vague, that Emma doesn't really /know/ him in the way that he expects her to. He's saying that he thought ultimate truth and ultimate understanding between people would be possible with telepathy. He never factored into it the human component.
He's bewildered and he's battered, but he's determined -- and he still searches for understanding, even if it isn't forthcoming. He'll lay seeds for later, maybe. And /saint/, of all words, not to mention the reference to Jean Grey-- well, he remembers what happened when he mentioned Jean to Emma the first time, so it's a safe bet that there're some ... well, issues there. To put it mildly. To accuse Rossi of looking for a saint is beyond ridiculous, and Chris knows it, and so would Emma if it was really about him.
Chris doesn't know about the body swap issue yet, so the kick of memory that Emma shares doesn't quite register for what it is. He assumes it's the reverse of what it really is; that she's seeing from his memories rather than the other way around, though how that makes real sense when she shows it from Storm's perspective is -- well, complicated. He doesn't really /understand/ telepathy.
The entire search for the outside perspectives on Emma is another thing that she misunderstood. Hampered by the loss of her telepathy, it makes sense that she would be paranoid and automatically suspect the worst from any and every situation.
Silence fumbles with the tatters of imagery, tentative with his voice through other people's ears. Familiar unfamiliarity. << Expectations I got, >> Rossi manages at last, tracking memory to its source. << You want me to be fair? I can't. So I went for a second opinion. >> His mouth curves, edges thinning to a passing rue. "I should've asked Chuck."
"Xavier." Emma snorts. "/He/ is the worst one of the lot. He rather enjoy being the reluctant hero."
"And what are you?" The spoken word, flat and blunt. "The villain of the piece?"
"Don't you know darling," Emma positively purrs, looking across the seat at him. "The villain is always the most interesting one." The car slows and begins to negotiate for a piece of clear sideway.
It takes him a few seconds to figure out what's going on. He doesn't apologize. He has nothing to apologize for. Going to other people to find out their perspectives on things, to get their statements, is standard operating procedure for a cop working on a case. And Emma is a case, no more, no less. Really. REALLY.
He moves out of telepathy into the vocal because it hurts. The tear of scar tissue is bleeding into his mind, and it needs to reheal. Safer to speak aloud.
Lips twist askew, gaze smudging dark. Rossi glances out the window; reclaims his cap and places it, straight, on his head. "I'm not your victim, Frost," he says, knuckle sliding thoughtlessly across its curved brim. He glances aside to meet blue eyes with green. "I'm not your hero, either."
"I would have thought /that/ was obvious, Chris," she replies tartly, granting him his name at the last.
I like my pose there, the smudge of shadow and the return of the cap. He's preparing to become the role again, getting his costume and his persona together. I'm slowing down. It's late! I'm tired! (This is a long commentary!) But given the cliche roles that Emma has cast for herself and Xavier, there are only a few characters left: namely, the victim, the sidekick, the minion-- he refuses the role of victim, just as he refuses the role of hero, which is a callback to how the log actually started, not to mention the pick-up line that Emma used to get to him in Windex.
He's not a sidekick either, though he doesn't mention that, and he's definitely not a minion. Basically, he's saying that he's outside the game, whatever the game might be that these crazy mutants are playing, so count him out. She can deal with him as Chris, but not as a pawn in their stupid contest.
And she answers him with his name, for the first time. And not just by name, but with his real name, not the /Christopher/ that she usually uses, but Chris, acknowledgment of his real self.
She earns an honest smile for that, a tarnished reflection of the younger man banked in Storm's memories. Untouched by sin, by cynicism and by pain. Emma's gift. Oh well. "Thanks for the ride, Emma." The door opens to a draft's gust, spilling in city air and street noise. Rossi touches his cap in salute. "Stay alive."
Emma inhales sharply, and he exits on a look of confused nostalgia, surprised out of her by the association she hadn't realized was buried so deeply in shared experiences untouched and avoided in a cranny of her mind.
He, at any rate, does not see it. His attention is turned outward, forward, back to the station that waits for his return. Straight-backed and settled, rearmored and rearmed, Det. Rossi climbs the stairs to his home and disappears inside.
Almost done. Thank God for that.
I'm not a big fan of the first of the two poses in that round -- it rings a bit clunky, though there are some not entirely awful bits to it. I did not play fair, here; since Emma brought out the Storm memories, I gave them back to her, giving her a moment there where Storm encountered the memory-wiped Chris.
And of course, Emma takes that and turns it into a gorgeous pose. I just love those first two phrases: 'Emma inhales sharply, and he exits on a look of confused nostalgia--' There's just something about the way that she constructed those two that is awesome.
It's so rare that Chris gets called his real name by the mutants who dog him. It's a strange and silly way to please him, but being called Christopher really bugs him, which (of course) is why they do it. Stupid though it sounds, it's dehumanizing; the condescension of it continues to rub him raw, and as long as that continues, he isn't really willing to deal one-on-one with any of them.
And now I'm so totally done with commentary. If something else occurs to me, I'll go back and edit, but there's no brainpower left. None. All gone.....