7/3/06 - Emma, Magneto
Continuation of this log from earlier in the day.
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< WES > Old Brownstone Apts #210 - Rossi
An ancient, faded elegance sketches the boundaries of this apartment, hinted at in crown molding and worn, faded floors. High walls span to high ceilings, pale yellow with the barest of white trim; at one end, three high windows gape to let in day's light or night's dark with equal indifference. A small kitchen pocks a hollow in one wall, a doorless entry that offers glimpses of an metal-framed refrigerator and a cabinet-hung microwave. On the other side of the small living room, a short hallway offers entrances to bathroom and bedroom, both doors battered with the wear and tear of age.
In the living room are the basic accoutrements of comfort: sofas, chairs, table, television. Spartan accessories, betraying little of the owner; that task is left for the walls, hung with pictures of family and friends. Through them all runs the thread of blue, NYPD's uniform tailored to pride and vigor.
[Exits : [O]ut ]
/Come over/, he coaxes during the drive, moved by some errant need beyond the immediate one burning his skin and senses. I'll drive you back tomorrow morning. Spend the night. His glance askance smiles, even in the passing stripes of street lights through the windows. Under the pornographic anticipation of his mind, something quieter and yearning, something as simple as human loneliness, washes through the edifice of sincere attachment. Liking. Fondness.
She says yes. It is enough.
In the darkened intimacy of his bedroom, clothing -- much of it -- left discarded and forgotten in their hasty passage through the living room, Rossi leans over his illusioned lover and touches bare skin with a practiced hand. Here, sensitive, singing nerves; there, a roil of lust and heat. He glances up that pale arch of body and smiles through the veil of lashes, lips tracing a path for fire to follow.
She said yes. It is enough. For the moment.
Fondness enough to give her pause. Liking enough to add regret to the mixture. Even after memory swings and rolls under her touch and events' origins are laid bare. Even then she whispers, "Time enough," into the dark, the meaning doubled by a layer of meaning hidden from his practiced ingenuity, and pulls him higher and deeper.
The New York night is humid and warm, but certain precautions are necessary with respect to the political climate of late. Slender metal plates rasp invisible within the stiff-pressed confines of Erik's black overcoat - the staunch collar arching high around the back of his neck, pressing rough into the increasingly disordly ripple of silver and grey that curls soft over muscle and bone there. Ice glints in his glare - polished metal, at his right ear. An aging window scrapes open, and Magneto's shadow falls dark over clothing scattered across the living room floor.
A hand trails up that smooth flank, fingers warm and against air-cooled, lust-heated skin. The dip of waist, the curve of breast; Chris brushes a kiss in the corner of that murmuring mouth, drowning his senses and hers in the scent and the taste of her. Arousal -- and then through the throb of pulse, abrupt attention. The black head lifts from her skin, arrested by sound; the man stills, muscles tightening. One finger touches to Emma's lips in a demand for silence.
Emma's whimper of protest dies, strangled deep in her throat by his sudden focus and she stills, wide-eyed and mute under his finger, throwing her own scattered senses in a wide-flung net, gaped and incomplete, but reforming quickly. Her hand presses against his shoulder and withdraws, silent assurance of her understanding.
From the living room, silence. Stillness. Vacancy. The canvasy material of his coat brushes over the smoother fabric of his slacks, black on black, and Erik tilts his jaw slowly down to squint at what appears to be a pair of panties just beside his left boot toe. There is nothing to indicate a telepathic presence. No further sound. And then - a flicker of acrid, super-heated steel, ghosting idle bafflement before it flickers and fades.
Though sound may not repeat, caution has sprung its trap, and Chris rises with it, pushing away from Emma to leave chill in his body's absence. The light from outside bathes him in gold, limning that naked, muscled body, blurring the scars that mar that dark skin. In hasty silence he snags a pair of boxers from the floor, pulling them over Emma's work. The gun is on the nightstand. He checks it with a professional's eye before touching the woman's shoulder. Stay here, he mouths.
If not enough for identification, it is enough for concern. Amber sits and almost unconsciously pulls the sheets from their tangled lump at the foot of the bed up, her attention focused as much on catching another flicker of presence as on Chris' movements. She nods at him and runs her hand through bed-tousled hair, pulling it away from her face.
Brows hooded low over the shadowed line of his glare, Erik's head tilts still further as his boot toe edges gently aside to poke - to prod. Slim-sewn fabric is turned slowly over. Yes. Definitely panties.
The bedroom door is already opened, left unsealed from their original, oblivious entrance. Convenient, now that the exit is a sharp-eyed, wary thing. Silent on bare feet, Chris eases himself into the hallway, back pressed to the wall, and makes his careful way down the hall. The gun is a heavy, eager thing in his hand: like its master, ready to fire, albeit with more deadly effect.
Emma drops a leg over the side of the bed and shifts up onto her knee, and waits, the sheet tucked up under her arm and held tightly in place.
Magneto smiles thinly to himself upon kicking the aforementioned undergarment nimbly aside - eyes flicking aside after trousers - a sock - a...semi-automatic. Erik's gaze lifts after the upward sketch of his brows, shoulders going straight and rigid beneath the reinforced guard of his coat.
The glance Det. Rossi skims around the corner of the wall is a quicksilver thing, the barest tip of gaze past plaster to the silhouetted figure framed against a window. Enough for recognition. Enough to kill what remains of lust. "Fuck me slowly with a chainsaw," he tells the night, baritone shredded through gritted teeth. A hand waves Emma back down the corridor -- stay -- while the gun lowers and Chris steps into the living room. 'Everyone Loves an Italian Boy,' the boxers read jauntily over the last gasp of his evening's fun. "For crying out loud," says the cop, aggrieved. "What the /fuck/."
Emma leans forward, her hand providing uncertain support against the spring of a well-used mattress, and slips into Rossi's mind to steal a peek, though her recognition only flares to life after his. "God/damn/," she hisses under her breath and holds still.
Squared to the hallway in lazy anticipation, Erik does not bother to suppress a slow half smile as his eyes drop the two or three feet necessary to confirm his suspicions. When they lift back to make eye contact, the firearm in Rossi's grip clicks - and again. The clip drops heavy to the floor. The slider jolts foward - the round there pops jauntily away and skitters off across the floor. The safety switches on. "Deep down I've always known that you really /are/ happy to see me." Dark amusement reflects hollow and disjointed through the apartment on the edge of an awkward pulse - mere mockery of a clear telepathic read. His right hand lifts away from his side just enough to hook paired fingers beneath the strap of a bra sprawled over the couch back. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"
Were any appetite left, it would shrivel and die an appalled death in the face of such amusement. "Funny," Rossi drawls, Brooklyn's accent thick and acrid across his tongue. By habit he checks his safety and the chamber before stooping for the clip. "I was in the middle of something, yeah. Don't suppose you want to come back later? My date's better looking than you are. No offense."
Curiosity calls Emma forward. Curiosity and a morbid fascination with the display of ego playing out in the next room over. Rather like a National Geographic special on elk in mating season. The opponents squaring off and circling each other, they occasional feint... Any minute now they'll come together in a titanic clash of determination and displays of power. And Emma refuses to follow that line of thought any further, thank god. She slips off the bed and creeps closer, feeling around the location of two previous flashes, and then pressuring Chris's attention to the man's headgear.
"A sense of humor is essential in my line of work, or so I am told." No acknowledgement of Chris' question granted, Erik simply turns the recently aquired bra over in his hands until long fingers have sought out a tag. Which he then inspects. "Impressive," he mutters, cultured tones admitting amusement where his expression refuses to. At his ear, a device modeled after a more mundane communication system is clipped solidly into place - metal spidering off into the silver of his hair to suggest a more complete structure around the back of his skull.
Rossi's gaze tracks that gleam of metal, obedient to Emma's impetus if without sound reason of its own. Professional speculation names the headgear (radio signal? Telephone? Monitoring device?) while eyes close for the harassed rub of fingertips in eyehollows. "She's hot," he says dryly, "and willing, not to mention /waiting/. Something particular you needed tonight? More pills? Or you planning on dropping off another loony tune in my kitchen?"
"Are they real?" Erik inquires with shameless curiousity, lines etched in firm over his brows to further indicate the sheer /depth/ of his mirth - bra still swinging delicately from paired fingers when he takes a swaggering step in poor Mario's direction. "They say it's difficult to tell, but I never found it to be exceedingly subtle, in terms of /build/, at the very least. But no. I was simply in the area."
"You're doing /social/ visits now?" Rossi wonders, uneasy mockery touching the blank retort. Gun loosely clasped in his hand, he straight-arms into the corner of the hallway, a stiffened barrier against forward progress. The line stops at Mario. And his plumbing. "Never occurred to me to ask. I'm not talking about my date with you. You've got your own harem. Go play with--" He breaks off; the dark face shifts, intent on a new thought. The urban baritone adjusts abruptly to more professional attention. "Did you get your people back?"
On the other side of the door frame, her back to the shielding afforded by thin layers of plaster and paper, Emma begins to seethe and search the room for something a little less aggravating to deal with than a bundle of bed sheet tangling up her legs and ankles.
A derelict parking garage. Barred cages. The scent of blood in the air. Ruptured organs. Burning flesh. Erik's nostrils flare at the memory that plays wavering and uncertain in the room about him until his teeth are bared into a sliver of a smile. "Two of them, and two more gained in the process. One was tortured to death before I could act." There's a pause, there, as cold blue eyes flicker to that imaginary barrier. "You aren't going to introduce me?"
The lowered hand closes into a fist, the images leaked from Erik's mind echoed in vivid, ragged perfection in Chris's. "I'm sorry," he says after a moment, accent roughening. Rossi's dark head bows, outthrust through the hunch of shoulders. "I saw the crime scene. And the videos. She might have-- dying was probably a relief for her, by that point. Not that that's any comfort."
Emma's progress toward the closet is halted by the flash flood of mental images from both men spilling over her too-lowered shields, and she stumbles, hitting the door with the flat of her hand before gripping the closet's knob and sinking into a crouch besides it. The sensations eventually fade, blotted out by thickening shields and a retreat from the pair's awareness. Emma cracks the closet door open and reaches in to tug the first thing from a hanger she can reach. The metal bounces and rattles on the closet bar.
Any real hint of humanity clears abruptly from Erik's features - glare frosting over until the crackle of ice there is nearly audible when it turns sharply back onto Christopher. "Videos?"
"They taped it," Rossi says, arm dropping, body turning to the sounds of movement from the bedroom behind him. "The fights, the torture-- the only things we didn't find were the porn tapes. I thought you knew. I figured you left the tapes for us to find. With the bodies," he tacks on, without the natural resentment of a Homicide detective. A glance skips back at Erik. "Don't move," he says. "I'm just going to go check on--" Her. He starts down the small corridor.
Jaw clenched and hollowed, Erik's temper struggles after this information. Taped. /Tapes/. Pornography. It would appear that he has not inquired after some of the more intricate details of their containment. For a good minute, he simply stands like this - chest out until the strain of it reminds him to breathe. To exhale, and to inhale as he falls into belated step behind Christopher.
Emma is hidden behind the opened closet door and is in the process of pulling the bed sheets wrapped around her underneath the large jacket she'd pulled on. It falls just below her hips and the arms are a bit long, but at least she's not going to trip. At Rossi's comment, she belatedly throws out a command, << NO! >>
The lean figure before Erik staggers, jolted in mid-step to stumble into the wall; the useless gun and its unfastened clip scrape hollowly against plaster. Rossi grabs at the bedroom door's lintel, knuckles cracking at his grip into wood. "Holy--" he begins, baritone thinned and sharpened. "What the /fuck/?!"
A hollow echo is all Erik receives, save for a flicker of amplified command - leonine head snapping an inch aside after the source, through the wall, in Chris' bedroom. His overcoat swings to an abrupt halt against the backs of his legs, and the great Magneto finds himself hesitating in the wake of Rossi's balk. What the fuck indeed.
Emma spins and pulls the last of the sheets from under the jacket and clenches it closed as she turns yet again, this time looking for-- she squeezes herself into the closet and pulls the door closed behind her.
Rossi recovers, pushing off to straighten. For the moment, Magneto is forgotten: more urgent, that voiceless imperative. His stalk stretches long-limbed and stiff; he rounds the corner on a swift stride, reaching for the door even as it closes to grapple with that handle and throw it wide.
Magneto remains in the hallway. A little unnerved, perhaps, as his right hand goes back to the device at his temple. It takes him several seconds to follow, scowling all the while.
To Rossi, she's no longer there, and the closet is just as he left it, albeit minus the jacket to his dress uniform and the crazily skewed hanger it hung on. Underneath the illusion, however, Emma sprawls across the boxes and bags that inevitably congregate on the floor of closets everywhere.
The hard green eyes sweep the interior of the closet, baffled -- a hand scrapes through the ranks of cheap suits and shirts, thrusting them aside in search of that absent woman -- before Rossi turns away to rake that same hand through hair. "The hell?" he demands in rhetorical question, leaving the closet bared and open. Under the bed? Behind the curtains? He stoops to check the former, dropping to a knee.
In steps Magneto, finally, brows knit low as he steadies himself in the doorway and tilts his chin enough to look in past Rossi to settle the glaciatic line of his glare /firmly/ upon Emma. She flickers, fades. Reappears. "You must be joking."
Emma's glare is tempered by equal parts confusion and fear. << I don't know why you are here, but /god/ you have the /worst/ timing, >> she projects, squirming further into the closet. After she tumbles a smelly t-shirt off her head. << I suppose asking you not to blow my identity is futile? >> Though heavens knows why she's bothering with telepathy.
"I /swear/ she was here a second ago," Chris is saying in the meantime, baffled frustration not unmixed with anxiety in the stress-flattened voice. Not under the bed. One long arm stretches to twitch aside the curtain, to little avail: not there, either. He rises only to claim a seat on the edge of the bed, elbows propping on knees, hands scrubbing at the dark face. "Jesus /Christ/. And I was having such a decent night, too. What the fuck did you do, Lensherr?"
Only every third or fourth word registered, and far less than that actually understood, Erik chuckles low and quiet as his glare sketches from mussed head to bare toes - unpleasant amusement finally winning over his initial unease to tug upward at the corners of his mouth. His eyes do not waver from Emma's location until he glances back to Rossi and back again -- and she's gone. This sobers him a little. A /little/. "I'm sure you were. And I haven't done a damned thing. Emma Frost. Really, Christopher, had I known you were this desperate I would have offered the services of one of my own."
Amid a flurry of bags and clothes, Emma scrambles out of the closet and rams a shove at the old man's shoulder. "Bastard," is hissed for his ears alone as Emma wraps her powers tightly around Rossi's perceptions. "What the /hell/ are you /doing/ here?"
Green eyes open just above the ragged horizon of fingertips, the rest of Chris's face lost behind the mask of broad hands. "The fuck," he says in muffled reply. Affection clenches a sick, tight fist of apprehension in his stomach, shades of another lost woman. Emma Frost. "Her name's Amber," he says more deliberately, arms dropping as he pulls himself up to stand. "There's a resemblance. That's all. Maybe she got past us into the bathroom." It is an unconvinced and unconvincing speculation; a quick glance checks the windows -- still closed -- and Rossi starts for the hallway.
The shove, somewhat unexpected, thumps Erik back into the side of the open door to the hallway, prompting a stiff grunt even as it's returned in the form of a back-handed swat aimed at Emma's already heavily worked upon face. "If anyone here should be demanding answers, it's /me/, you thankless harlot."
"I should think the answers were obvious," Emma growls, rubbing her cheek and stepping back out of range and into the closet doorframe. Rossi's departure is watched with a wary eye.
Lensherr's activities a bare smudge on his radar, Chris pushes past to pad down the hallway, hair hedgehogging wildly to the troubled fret of his hand. A few moments later, the light in the bathroom switches on. Quiet baritone sounds in a curse.
Angled features pulling into a sneer, anger bristles past the confines of Magneto's self-manufactured device, illuminating fractures in its make as he bears back down upon her. "You /should/ think, but you never do. Relase him."
Release.
Thank you.
No problem.
Fucker.
You love me. Shut up.
I do, so hard. Let's fuck.
Would you two like to be alone?
Please God no. Carry on.
"Or /what/? You'll force me?" Emma grasps at the edges of anger and infuses it with her own as she forces the emotions back through their containment's crevices. "I've had more than enough of people telling me what to /do/."
"Perhaps if you listened to them every now and again the entire population of your people that you've damned very nearly single-handedly would BENEFIT." Anger builds upon anger, and Erik's eyes flash iced and deadly as his voice falls into a fury-driven bellow. Fractures yawn onto chasms - smaller breaks spidering out in irregular bursts across the shield's invisible mantle. "You should thank me that I have resisted pulling you apart for as long as I have!"
A snarl of emotions repressed and ignored and frustrated boil forth in a wordless backlash, and the psionic shield dissolves, pulverized again and again as it works to reform. Illusions are forgotten as her powers contend with reaching for control past the incomplete shield. "Then do it, Erik. Do it! Forget that I've done what I thought best, what I thought would protect us. Kill me for your /own/ sin."
Imminent disaster looms in Rossi's bedroom. Chris, unaware, pads out of the bathroom and casts a puzzled glance into the living room. "Shit," he tells the empty room, snagging her bra to sling it over his shoulder as he passes. "She can't have jus--" There. Voices. His head jerks, tugged by the sounds of argument like a compass needle to its lodestone; with a short-lived jog, he retreats down the hallway again to burst back into his bedroom. Magneto. Emma--
Rossi pales, blood receding under the skin. The startled mind reels with the last, remembered blaze of a long-ago night. "/You/."
Malicious fires stoked and fanned, rage flares on draconic wings, prepared to swoop in and act mercilessly upon that perceived dare with very little attention spared for anything else, from the smoldering malfunction of the device at his ear or Rossi's exclamation. Magneto steps forward and starts to lift his hand.
Emma's eyes narrow and she glares back, incandescent in fury despite the awkwardness of her wardrobe. Rossi's return is given the thinnest sliver of attention, but it's the lift of Magneto's hand that does it, really. Emma inhales and tenses, but instead of turning inward defensively, her power contracts, then expands in flashpoint of psionic energy, and a shockwave expands in a concentric circle, pouring power through and around the shoddy protection given by the device and into Magneto's mind, and then hitting Rossi a split second later.
There is time for a word, a single, inarticulate cry dropped like a pebble in the tidal wave of power. A human voice in the mind as it flays, crumbling under the concussion of psionic backwash: cut loose from the strings of will, Chris Rossi collapses, boneless and limp to the floor.
Nearest the source, Erik hardly has time to look surprised before blue-grey eyes have rolled back and only half-closed. His knees buckle, and down he goes hard onto his side. Out cold, shoulder driven uncomfortably close to Rossi's groin.
Well, might as well join the party. Emma slips to her knees, her hands catching her before her nose has an unfortunate accident with the floor.
There is something almost endearing in the arrangement of the two men curled together, joined in sweet oblivion. Relaxed, eased from its habitual lines of care, Chris's face takes on a younger cast: innocence lost from a decade or more. The naked chest stirs in quiet, even breathing, exhalations stirring black hair fallen across the serene face. One hand is not, truly not, cupping Magneto's thigh.
Freshly bruised ribs are spared by shallow breaths; muscular tension remaining despite the slack of Erik's general posture. Other than the rise and fall of his back, he is still.
Emma sits there for a while, resting and regrouping in the aftermath of psionic snuffing, though the pounding in her head doesn't allow her true rest. Finally, she climbs to her feet and stumbles for the door, pausing over each form first to assure herself that the reprieve from their presence isn't permanent. And to retrieve her bra from Rossi's hand. Minutes later, dressed and medicated (Rossi really should learn not to keep his pills laying about) and with a car waiting downstairs, she disappears. This time literally.
[Log ends]
Rossi wants love. Rossi gets ... Magneto. And Emma Frost. And Christ, it's enough to give a man a complex. Meanwhile, look at his boxers! Really not what you want to be wearing when you find Erik Lensherr standing in your living room.
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< WES > Old Brownstone Apts #210 - Rossi
An ancient, faded elegance sketches the boundaries of this apartment, hinted at in crown molding and worn, faded floors. High walls span to high ceilings, pale yellow with the barest of white trim; at one end, three high windows gape to let in day's light or night's dark with equal indifference. A small kitchen pocks a hollow in one wall, a doorless entry that offers glimpses of an metal-framed refrigerator and a cabinet-hung microwave. On the other side of the small living room, a short hallway offers entrances to bathroom and bedroom, both doors battered with the wear and tear of age.
In the living room are the basic accoutrements of comfort: sofas, chairs, table, television. Spartan accessories, betraying little of the owner; that task is left for the walls, hung with pictures of family and friends. Through them all runs the thread of blue, NYPD's uniform tailored to pride and vigor.
[Exits : [O]ut ]
/Come over/, he coaxes during the drive, moved by some errant need beyond the immediate one burning his skin and senses. I'll drive you back tomorrow morning. Spend the night. His glance askance smiles, even in the passing stripes of street lights through the windows. Under the pornographic anticipation of his mind, something quieter and yearning, something as simple as human loneliness, washes through the edifice of sincere attachment. Liking. Fondness.
She says yes. It is enough.
In the darkened intimacy of his bedroom, clothing -- much of it -- left discarded and forgotten in their hasty passage through the living room, Rossi leans over his illusioned lover and touches bare skin with a practiced hand. Here, sensitive, singing nerves; there, a roil of lust and heat. He glances up that pale arch of body and smiles through the veil of lashes, lips tracing a path for fire to follow.
She said yes. It is enough. For the moment.
Fondness enough to give her pause. Liking enough to add regret to the mixture. Even after memory swings and rolls under her touch and events' origins are laid bare. Even then she whispers, "Time enough," into the dark, the meaning doubled by a layer of meaning hidden from his practiced ingenuity, and pulls him higher and deeper.
The New York night is humid and warm, but certain precautions are necessary with respect to the political climate of late. Slender metal plates rasp invisible within the stiff-pressed confines of Erik's black overcoat - the staunch collar arching high around the back of his neck, pressing rough into the increasingly disordly ripple of silver and grey that curls soft over muscle and bone there. Ice glints in his glare - polished metal, at his right ear. An aging window scrapes open, and Magneto's shadow falls dark over clothing scattered across the living room floor.
A hand trails up that smooth flank, fingers warm and against air-cooled, lust-heated skin. The dip of waist, the curve of breast; Chris brushes a kiss in the corner of that murmuring mouth, drowning his senses and hers in the scent and the taste of her. Arousal -- and then through the throb of pulse, abrupt attention. The black head lifts from her skin, arrested by sound; the man stills, muscles tightening. One finger touches to Emma's lips in a demand for silence.
Emma's whimper of protest dies, strangled deep in her throat by his sudden focus and she stills, wide-eyed and mute under his finger, throwing her own scattered senses in a wide-flung net, gaped and incomplete, but reforming quickly. Her hand presses against his shoulder and withdraws, silent assurance of her understanding.
From the living room, silence. Stillness. Vacancy. The canvasy material of his coat brushes over the smoother fabric of his slacks, black on black, and Erik tilts his jaw slowly down to squint at what appears to be a pair of panties just beside his left boot toe. There is nothing to indicate a telepathic presence. No further sound. And then - a flicker of acrid, super-heated steel, ghosting idle bafflement before it flickers and fades.
Though sound may not repeat, caution has sprung its trap, and Chris rises with it, pushing away from Emma to leave chill in his body's absence. The light from outside bathes him in gold, limning that naked, muscled body, blurring the scars that mar that dark skin. In hasty silence he snags a pair of boxers from the floor, pulling them over Emma's work. The gun is on the nightstand. He checks it with a professional's eye before touching the woman's shoulder. Stay here, he mouths.
If not enough for identification, it is enough for concern. Amber sits and almost unconsciously pulls the sheets from their tangled lump at the foot of the bed up, her attention focused as much on catching another flicker of presence as on Chris' movements. She nods at him and runs her hand through bed-tousled hair, pulling it away from her face.
Brows hooded low over the shadowed line of his glare, Erik's head tilts still further as his boot toe edges gently aside to poke - to prod. Slim-sewn fabric is turned slowly over. Yes. Definitely panties.
The bedroom door is already opened, left unsealed from their original, oblivious entrance. Convenient, now that the exit is a sharp-eyed, wary thing. Silent on bare feet, Chris eases himself into the hallway, back pressed to the wall, and makes his careful way down the hall. The gun is a heavy, eager thing in his hand: like its master, ready to fire, albeit with more deadly effect.
Emma drops a leg over the side of the bed and shifts up onto her knee, and waits, the sheet tucked up under her arm and held tightly in place.
Magneto smiles thinly to himself upon kicking the aforementioned undergarment nimbly aside - eyes flicking aside after trousers - a sock - a...semi-automatic. Erik's gaze lifts after the upward sketch of his brows, shoulders going straight and rigid beneath the reinforced guard of his coat.
The glance Det. Rossi skims around the corner of the wall is a quicksilver thing, the barest tip of gaze past plaster to the silhouetted figure framed against a window. Enough for recognition. Enough to kill what remains of lust. "Fuck me slowly with a chainsaw," he tells the night, baritone shredded through gritted teeth. A hand waves Emma back down the corridor -- stay -- while the gun lowers and Chris steps into the living room. 'Everyone Loves an Italian Boy,' the boxers read jauntily over the last gasp of his evening's fun. "For crying out loud," says the cop, aggrieved. "What the /fuck/."
Emma leans forward, her hand providing uncertain support against the spring of a well-used mattress, and slips into Rossi's mind to steal a peek, though her recognition only flares to life after his. "God/damn/," she hisses under her breath and holds still.
Squared to the hallway in lazy anticipation, Erik does not bother to suppress a slow half smile as his eyes drop the two or three feet necessary to confirm his suspicions. When they lift back to make eye contact, the firearm in Rossi's grip clicks - and again. The clip drops heavy to the floor. The slider jolts foward - the round there pops jauntily away and skitters off across the floor. The safety switches on. "Deep down I've always known that you really /are/ happy to see me." Dark amusement reflects hollow and disjointed through the apartment on the edge of an awkward pulse - mere mockery of a clear telepathic read. His right hand lifts away from his side just enough to hook paired fingers beneath the strap of a bra sprawled over the couch back. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"
Were any appetite left, it would shrivel and die an appalled death in the face of such amusement. "Funny," Rossi drawls, Brooklyn's accent thick and acrid across his tongue. By habit he checks his safety and the chamber before stooping for the clip. "I was in the middle of something, yeah. Don't suppose you want to come back later? My date's better looking than you are. No offense."
Curiosity calls Emma forward. Curiosity and a morbid fascination with the display of ego playing out in the next room over. Rather like a National Geographic special on elk in mating season. The opponents squaring off and circling each other, they occasional feint... Any minute now they'll come together in a titanic clash of determination and displays of power. And Emma refuses to follow that line of thought any further, thank god. She slips off the bed and creeps closer, feeling around the location of two previous flashes, and then pressuring Chris's attention to the man's headgear.
"A sense of humor is essential in my line of work, or so I am told." No acknowledgement of Chris' question granted, Erik simply turns the recently aquired bra over in his hands until long fingers have sought out a tag. Which he then inspects. "Impressive," he mutters, cultured tones admitting amusement where his expression refuses to. At his ear, a device modeled after a more mundane communication system is clipped solidly into place - metal spidering off into the silver of his hair to suggest a more complete structure around the back of his skull.
Rossi's gaze tracks that gleam of metal, obedient to Emma's impetus if without sound reason of its own. Professional speculation names the headgear (radio signal? Telephone? Monitoring device?) while eyes close for the harassed rub of fingertips in eyehollows. "She's hot," he says dryly, "and willing, not to mention /waiting/. Something particular you needed tonight? More pills? Or you planning on dropping off another loony tune in my kitchen?"
"Are they real?" Erik inquires with shameless curiousity, lines etched in firm over his brows to further indicate the sheer /depth/ of his mirth - bra still swinging delicately from paired fingers when he takes a swaggering step in poor Mario's direction. "They say it's difficult to tell, but I never found it to be exceedingly subtle, in terms of /build/, at the very least. But no. I was simply in the area."
"You're doing /social/ visits now?" Rossi wonders, uneasy mockery touching the blank retort. Gun loosely clasped in his hand, he straight-arms into the corner of the hallway, a stiffened barrier against forward progress. The line stops at Mario. And his plumbing. "Never occurred to me to ask. I'm not talking about my date with you. You've got your own harem. Go play with--" He breaks off; the dark face shifts, intent on a new thought. The urban baritone adjusts abruptly to more professional attention. "Did you get your people back?"
On the other side of the door frame, her back to the shielding afforded by thin layers of plaster and paper, Emma begins to seethe and search the room for something a little less aggravating to deal with than a bundle of bed sheet tangling up her legs and ankles.
A derelict parking garage. Barred cages. The scent of blood in the air. Ruptured organs. Burning flesh. Erik's nostrils flare at the memory that plays wavering and uncertain in the room about him until his teeth are bared into a sliver of a smile. "Two of them, and two more gained in the process. One was tortured to death before I could act." There's a pause, there, as cold blue eyes flicker to that imaginary barrier. "You aren't going to introduce me?"
The lowered hand closes into a fist, the images leaked from Erik's mind echoed in vivid, ragged perfection in Chris's. "I'm sorry," he says after a moment, accent roughening. Rossi's dark head bows, outthrust through the hunch of shoulders. "I saw the crime scene. And the videos. She might have-- dying was probably a relief for her, by that point. Not that that's any comfort."
Emma's progress toward the closet is halted by the flash flood of mental images from both men spilling over her too-lowered shields, and she stumbles, hitting the door with the flat of her hand before gripping the closet's knob and sinking into a crouch besides it. The sensations eventually fade, blotted out by thickening shields and a retreat from the pair's awareness. Emma cracks the closet door open and reaches in to tug the first thing from a hanger she can reach. The metal bounces and rattles on the closet bar.
Any real hint of humanity clears abruptly from Erik's features - glare frosting over until the crackle of ice there is nearly audible when it turns sharply back onto Christopher. "Videos?"
"They taped it," Rossi says, arm dropping, body turning to the sounds of movement from the bedroom behind him. "The fights, the torture-- the only things we didn't find were the porn tapes. I thought you knew. I figured you left the tapes for us to find. With the bodies," he tacks on, without the natural resentment of a Homicide detective. A glance skips back at Erik. "Don't move," he says. "I'm just going to go check on--" Her. He starts down the small corridor.
Jaw clenched and hollowed, Erik's temper struggles after this information. Taped. /Tapes/. Pornography. It would appear that he has not inquired after some of the more intricate details of their containment. For a good minute, he simply stands like this - chest out until the strain of it reminds him to breathe. To exhale, and to inhale as he falls into belated step behind Christopher.
Emma is hidden behind the opened closet door and is in the process of pulling the bed sheets wrapped around her underneath the large jacket she'd pulled on. It falls just below her hips and the arms are a bit long, but at least she's not going to trip. At Rossi's comment, she belatedly throws out a command, << NO! >>
The lean figure before Erik staggers, jolted in mid-step to stumble into the wall; the useless gun and its unfastened clip scrape hollowly against plaster. Rossi grabs at the bedroom door's lintel, knuckles cracking at his grip into wood. "Holy--" he begins, baritone thinned and sharpened. "What the /fuck/?!"
A hollow echo is all Erik receives, save for a flicker of amplified command - leonine head snapping an inch aside after the source, through the wall, in Chris' bedroom. His overcoat swings to an abrupt halt against the backs of his legs, and the great Magneto finds himself hesitating in the wake of Rossi's balk. What the fuck indeed.
Emma spins and pulls the last of the sheets from under the jacket and clenches it closed as she turns yet again, this time looking for-- she squeezes herself into the closet and pulls the door closed behind her.
Rossi recovers, pushing off to straighten. For the moment, Magneto is forgotten: more urgent, that voiceless imperative. His stalk stretches long-limbed and stiff; he rounds the corner on a swift stride, reaching for the door even as it closes to grapple with that handle and throw it wide.
Magneto remains in the hallway. A little unnerved, perhaps, as his right hand goes back to the device at his temple. It takes him several seconds to follow, scowling all the while.
To Rossi, she's no longer there, and the closet is just as he left it, albeit minus the jacket to his dress uniform and the crazily skewed hanger it hung on. Underneath the illusion, however, Emma sprawls across the boxes and bags that inevitably congregate on the floor of closets everywhere.
The hard green eyes sweep the interior of the closet, baffled -- a hand scrapes through the ranks of cheap suits and shirts, thrusting them aside in search of that absent woman -- before Rossi turns away to rake that same hand through hair. "The hell?" he demands in rhetorical question, leaving the closet bared and open. Under the bed? Behind the curtains? He stoops to check the former, dropping to a knee.
In steps Magneto, finally, brows knit low as he steadies himself in the doorway and tilts his chin enough to look in past Rossi to settle the glaciatic line of his glare /firmly/ upon Emma. She flickers, fades. Reappears. "You must be joking."
Emma's glare is tempered by equal parts confusion and fear. << I don't know why you are here, but /god/ you have the /worst/ timing, >> she projects, squirming further into the closet. After she tumbles a smelly t-shirt off her head. << I suppose asking you not to blow my identity is futile? >> Though heavens knows why she's bothering with telepathy.
"I /swear/ she was here a second ago," Chris is saying in the meantime, baffled frustration not unmixed with anxiety in the stress-flattened voice. Not under the bed. One long arm stretches to twitch aside the curtain, to little avail: not there, either. He rises only to claim a seat on the edge of the bed, elbows propping on knees, hands scrubbing at the dark face. "Jesus /Christ/. And I was having such a decent night, too. What the fuck did you do, Lensherr?"
Only every third or fourth word registered, and far less than that actually understood, Erik chuckles low and quiet as his glare sketches from mussed head to bare toes - unpleasant amusement finally winning over his initial unease to tug upward at the corners of his mouth. His eyes do not waver from Emma's location until he glances back to Rossi and back again -- and she's gone. This sobers him a little. A /little/. "I'm sure you were. And I haven't done a damned thing. Emma Frost. Really, Christopher, had I known you were this desperate I would have offered the services of one of my own."
Amid a flurry of bags and clothes, Emma scrambles out of the closet and rams a shove at the old man's shoulder. "Bastard," is hissed for his ears alone as Emma wraps her powers tightly around Rossi's perceptions. "What the /hell/ are you /doing/ here?"
Green eyes open just above the ragged horizon of fingertips, the rest of Chris's face lost behind the mask of broad hands. "The fuck," he says in muffled reply. Affection clenches a sick, tight fist of apprehension in his stomach, shades of another lost woman. Emma Frost. "Her name's Amber," he says more deliberately, arms dropping as he pulls himself up to stand. "There's a resemblance. That's all. Maybe she got past us into the bathroom." It is an unconvinced and unconvincing speculation; a quick glance checks the windows -- still closed -- and Rossi starts for the hallway.
The shove, somewhat unexpected, thumps Erik back into the side of the open door to the hallway, prompting a stiff grunt even as it's returned in the form of a back-handed swat aimed at Emma's already heavily worked upon face. "If anyone here should be demanding answers, it's /me/, you thankless harlot."
"I should think the answers were obvious," Emma growls, rubbing her cheek and stepping back out of range and into the closet doorframe. Rossi's departure is watched with a wary eye.
Lensherr's activities a bare smudge on his radar, Chris pushes past to pad down the hallway, hair hedgehogging wildly to the troubled fret of his hand. A few moments later, the light in the bathroom switches on. Quiet baritone sounds in a curse.
Angled features pulling into a sneer, anger bristles past the confines of Magneto's self-manufactured device, illuminating fractures in its make as he bears back down upon her. "You /should/ think, but you never do. Relase him."
Release.
Thank you.
No problem.
Fucker.
You love me. Shut up.
I do, so hard. Let's fuck.
Would you two like to be alone?
Please God no. Carry on.
"Or /what/? You'll force me?" Emma grasps at the edges of anger and infuses it with her own as she forces the emotions back through their containment's crevices. "I've had more than enough of people telling me what to /do/."
"Perhaps if you listened to them every now and again the entire population of your people that you've damned very nearly single-handedly would BENEFIT." Anger builds upon anger, and Erik's eyes flash iced and deadly as his voice falls into a fury-driven bellow. Fractures yawn onto chasms - smaller breaks spidering out in irregular bursts across the shield's invisible mantle. "You should thank me that I have resisted pulling you apart for as long as I have!"
A snarl of emotions repressed and ignored and frustrated boil forth in a wordless backlash, and the psionic shield dissolves, pulverized again and again as it works to reform. Illusions are forgotten as her powers contend with reaching for control past the incomplete shield. "Then do it, Erik. Do it! Forget that I've done what I thought best, what I thought would protect us. Kill me for your /own/ sin."
Imminent disaster looms in Rossi's bedroom. Chris, unaware, pads out of the bathroom and casts a puzzled glance into the living room. "Shit," he tells the empty room, snagging her bra to sling it over his shoulder as he passes. "She can't have jus--" There. Voices. His head jerks, tugged by the sounds of argument like a compass needle to its lodestone; with a short-lived jog, he retreats down the hallway again to burst back into his bedroom. Magneto. Emma--
Rossi pales, blood receding under the skin. The startled mind reels with the last, remembered blaze of a long-ago night. "/You/."
Malicious fires stoked and fanned, rage flares on draconic wings, prepared to swoop in and act mercilessly upon that perceived dare with very little attention spared for anything else, from the smoldering malfunction of the device at his ear or Rossi's exclamation. Magneto steps forward and starts to lift his hand.
Emma's eyes narrow and she glares back, incandescent in fury despite the awkwardness of her wardrobe. Rossi's return is given the thinnest sliver of attention, but it's the lift of Magneto's hand that does it, really. Emma inhales and tenses, but instead of turning inward defensively, her power contracts, then expands in flashpoint of psionic energy, and a shockwave expands in a concentric circle, pouring power through and around the shoddy protection given by the device and into Magneto's mind, and then hitting Rossi a split second later.
There is time for a word, a single, inarticulate cry dropped like a pebble in the tidal wave of power. A human voice in the mind as it flays, crumbling under the concussion of psionic backwash: cut loose from the strings of will, Chris Rossi collapses, boneless and limp to the floor.
Nearest the source, Erik hardly has time to look surprised before blue-grey eyes have rolled back and only half-closed. His knees buckle, and down he goes hard onto his side. Out cold, shoulder driven uncomfortably close to Rossi's groin.
Well, might as well join the party. Emma slips to her knees, her hands catching her before her nose has an unfortunate accident with the floor.
There is something almost endearing in the arrangement of the two men curled together, joined in sweet oblivion. Relaxed, eased from its habitual lines of care, Chris's face takes on a younger cast: innocence lost from a decade or more. The naked chest stirs in quiet, even breathing, exhalations stirring black hair fallen across the serene face. One hand is not, truly not, cupping Magneto's thigh.
Freshly bruised ribs are spared by shallow breaths; muscular tension remaining despite the slack of Erik's general posture. Other than the rise and fall of his back, he is still.
Emma sits there for a while, resting and regrouping in the aftermath of psionic snuffing, though the pounding in her head doesn't allow her true rest. Finally, she climbs to her feet and stumbles for the door, pausing over each form first to assure herself that the reprieve from their presence isn't permanent. And to retrieve her bra from Rossi's hand. Minutes later, dressed and medicated (Rossi really should learn not to keep his pills laying about) and with a car waiting downstairs, she disappears. This time literally.
[Log ends]
Rossi wants love. Rossi gets ... Magneto. And Emma Frost. And Christ, it's enough to give a man a complex. Meanwhile, look at his boxers! Really not what you want to be wearing when you find Erik Lensherr standing in your living room.