OOC: Fight with Sabitha Commentary Part 1
Log: Fight with Sabby
Date: June 8, 2006
Players: Sabitha & Rossi
Continued in: Part 2
I promised this commentary to Sabitha's player a long time ago, but somehow never got around to it. Well. It's been a busy few months. However, good things come to those who wait, so I hereby present the commentary to the last in-memory interaction between Chris Rossi and Sabitha Melcross.
As it's been a while since I've done one of these, and we do have a few new people on the grid, I'll reprint my explanation for what a commentary is.
Commentaries began several months ago by the prompting of xmm_percy's player, who found the meme somewhere out there in the wild internet woods. They are, if you can imagine it, just like the commentaries provided on DVDs, where the director or the actors provide voiceovers over the action and the dialogue to give you further insight into the characters, the mechanics of the scene, the history behind why they did something one way as opposed to another, and so on, so forth. Log commentaries are the selfsame thing, except done on logs instead of on DVDs. They are purely OOC, as is the information in them, but from the OOC and the IC perspective, they allow you to discover things about your characters and their relationships, as well as explain and explore the RP that you do. From an outsider's point of view, it can just be fun to learn more about the characters that you interact with on the grid, even if that information is only educational, instead of useful.
That said, on with the commentary.
The scenario is as follows. This is the second to last time that Chris will encounter Sabby before she dies, though neither player realized that at the time. In fact, at the time this scene was done, there was no real intent for Sabby to die at all. The plotline is a complicated one and I won't go into it here -- the entire storyarc is listed and up, with a collection of logs, over here.
Magneto kidnapped Sabitha earlier in the week, and has just released her after a couple of days incarceration. The reason Sabitha was kidnapped is, of course, that the players of Sabitha and Magneto are massive twinks who shared a long car ride back from Canada together and quite possibly spent most of the drive smoking pot. Be that as it may, Sabitha is now free, and she is possessed of the knowledge that her friend -- pardon, her one-time friend, Chris Rossi -- effectively betrayed her trust. It's hard to say whose betrayal was greater: Sabitha betrayed Rossi to Emma Frost when she mistakenly put him on the track of the Hellions. This resulted in Rossi getting his mind wiped, which in turn led to psychological damage and suicidal tendencies until he was unwiped by Charles Xavier. He betrayed her trust to gain information on the Hellions once his memory was returned, a personal investigation that was later seized by the Feds and resulted in mutant identification technology ending up in the hands of the federal government and directly led to mutant registration.
There are two things to note about Sabitha's player, for those who are unfortunate enough never to have RPed with her.
Sabitha hesitates in the hallway outside Christopher Rossi's apartment. Vincent's, apparently, has been discarded as a possible refuge, and she is giving deep thought to whether she ought to simply beg someone for change enough to call Percy for a ride home. Deep thought, eventually, loses out to something else, because Sabby's fist rises to rap sharply against Rossi's door, a demanding beat, and then falls back to her side. Sabby is not bruised or broken, except for the careful tilt of her left arm as she resists moving the shoulder too much. She's merely a bit dirty, hair a mess of tangles, clothes lived in for several days, and very, very tired. Circles smudge darkly under her eyes, and her expression is blank as she waits.
There is movement inside, a shuffle of minor proportions that jabs in time with a muffled beat. Conga pulses in the background, fed from a perverse radio; unstable on walking casts, Chris Rossi solemnly dances, dips his crutch, and bumps his shoulder into the wall beside the door. "Yeah," he calls through the wood, pressing his back into the plaster. "Who is it?"
I don't have a great deal to say about this first exchange of poses, and ... I will probably eat my words now. I usually do with this sort of thing. I start out with nothing to say and then fourteen paragraphs later I realize I should maybe move on to the next set of poses sometime this year.
Rossi's mood here is a bit precarious, but it's only been a few weeks since he got his memories back and discovered that someone that he considered a friend betrayed him. As a cynic, he rightly or wrongly considers himself at fault for putting himself in a position where it was possible for her to betray him; as a cop, he thinks he is in control of his reactions to the betrayal and the mental (and to some extent physical) rape that followed on the heels of that treachery. He should know better. He does know better, but he is a man, and a very masculine one at that, and the kind of violation he experienced isn't something that he can really understand or put into context with the kind of rape victims have to deal with all the time. Men -- straight, strong, cop men -- do not experience this sort of thing. They are, lamentably, the perpetrators when it happens to them at all. Perpetrators or friends/family of survivors. Never victims. He represses, he suppresses, and he struggles to deal with the feeling of helplessness and rage that he is left with in the wake of regaining his memories.
And as part of regaining power, he starts the investigation all over again. And he betrays Sabby, ripping off her hard drive under the pretext of a social call. He reads her journal. He finds out about her involvement. He reads her innermost thoughts.
Forge stuffs him in a closet. Well. This maybe did not help with his feelings of helplessness. He was a little pissed about that.
At any rate, his mood is precarious, like his temper, and since he's also recovering (hence the crutches) from an attack in his own home by Deadpool, he's not feeling particularly open to visitors, either. Ridiculously, he is dancing. Er. Yes. Let me explain about that.
The scene, the one I expected, wasn't going to be as intense as it turned out to be -- but it was going to be pretty serious, I knew that much. Sabitha knows Chris got her information; likewise, Chris knows she knows. Whether they choose to confront each other about that remained to be seen, but given that she was also returning from Magneto's captivity and was probably going to be feeling emotionally fragile, it stood to reason that this was going to be a really serious scene. Given that, the very small director in me tried to brighten the mood at the offset. The image of a physically crippled Chris sashaying the congo with his crutch was comical to me, and gave a lighter touch to contrast later drama. He has danced before on-camera, so this isn't completely out of the blue. Even a cop has a little rhythm.
Sabitha is silent for a moment, raising her hand to knock again at the door with heavy thunks. After a moment of this, she speaks. "Chris." As an answer, it is fairly incorrect.
One of the characteristics of playing with Sabitha (and with certain other players as well, though Sabitha's player is the one that leaps strongest to mind in this regard) is that it leans heavily towards the dialogue. Eventually during the course of any scene with her, we will end up losing a lot of the physicality of the scene and going dialogue redux, with mostly words and short, short poses, which makes for a faster tempo and -- given the experience of RP -- elevates the intensity of the scene. This is one of the few scenes with her where we haven't done that, though there is variation in the attention given to physical presence as opposed to vocal. My preference has always been for the physical, myself; where my char is, how he's standing, what he's doing, what he looks like. Between the two of us, we sort of maintained a good balance for this scene, I think, up until near the end.
Like the man said, "I don't know art, but I know what I like." The last sentence of Sabitha's pose is something I like, an example of meta done well. It's almost throwaway, but it has a narrative feel to it that doesn't intrude on either the setting or the outsider's perspective of the character. I have strong opinions about meta, mostly about meta that's done poorly. Sabby's player is one of the players who does it well. Her meta doesn't intrude, nor does it give me more information than I can work with. At the risk of sounding like one of those pretentious asshats who try to escalate RP to an art form and philosophy that it really doesn't deserve, I'll note that for me, a lot of the joy of RP is uncovering the mystery. Not being presented with everything on a little platter, but to work towards communication between characters, verbally and through body language. If I wanted a telepath's insight into a mind, I would play a telepath. In the very fact of being interactive, RP differs from the static process of reading a book: there is labor involved on both sides where two very different people try to connect. No cheating. This, to me, is the fun part about RP, and I think this is why I'm personally so against crystal skull meta. To be told OOCly what's going on in someone's mind through meta doesn't give me an IC clue towards communication. All it does is infuriate/exasperate/frustrate/bore. As I've mentioned before in other commentaries: sensuality isn't in the nudity, it's in the getting naked.
Okay. Uh. Off the soapbox and back to the actual RP.
It suffices. On the other side of the door, the cop sinks his head back against the wall, expression closing, eyes blanking and unfocusing. Silence, for a moment. The stiffened legs flatten his spine, shoulders squaring in abrupt tension. Then: "Yeah." And, as abrupt, "Hold on." Chains. Locks. Metal ripples and bolts back; the door flings open to bare Chris in sweats and sling. Green eyes squint. "Hey, Melcross."
I'm not a big fan of my pose here. I had the right idea, I think; the sentence structure tends toward the short and abrupt, cutting back on the longer phrases used in the initial set when everything was conga-y, but well. With the introduction of Sabitha, the loose and easy mood Chris was experiencing tightens and shuts down. He becomes wary. He becomes curt. The feeling for the pose is okay, and in and of itself it's functional, but there's an awkwardness to the description of the physical that doesn't especially impress me. Oh well.
In the last year or so I've tried hard to cut back on the purple in regards to Rossi RP. He is not a purple man! ...but I think I may have gone too far in the other direction. I'll have to think about that one.
Chris braces himself, both physically and mentally. This is, as I mentioned before, the first time that he's encountered Sabitha since both became aware of the other's knowledge. In the privacy of his own apartment, with no other eyes watching, he's able to express himself using his first and primary medium, the physical. I'm not sure if Chris's physicality is because I feel my strength is in the physical expression, but it works for him; he lives in his skin, and -- for him, at least -- the remainder of this scene is a picture of him controlling it. Not so much as he does in the interrogation room, say, or out on the field where he has to. He is capable of great discipline on duty. In his personal life, that's where things get a little debateable. More on that later.
His greeting to Sabitha is very commonplace, almost lackadaisical. Certainly neutral, with no overt hostility. This isn't so much because he's hiding or lying to her, which Sabitha later accuses him of, but because he takes in her appearance right off the bat and is, bizarrely, trying to be fair. He is aware that his reactions to her cannot possibly be even-keeled or rational, or free of emotional baggage. If it were the job, he'd take immediate advantage of the fact that she looks like she's been through the wringer, both physically and emotionally, to gain the other hand. In personal life he is (or at least tries to be) conscious of the tools that he uses on the job and tries to separate himself from them. With, I should add, indifferent success. You can't just turn on and turn off the way you deal with and handle people; they become part of your personality, part of your worldview. When he tries to separate himself from those skills he exercises as a cop, he starts becoming artificial -- even cold -- because it's someone other than who he is.
So given this moment and her appearance, he takes himself in hand and chooses to wait. He will not attack her, or confront her, or accuse her of anything until she is able to give back as good as she gets. There's no satisfaction in beating the weak. When he gets his moment to confront Judas, he wants to be the righteous one, not the one taking advantage. He does not want to feel sorry for her. So. Hey, Melcross.
Sabitha hunches her right shoulder forward, hand tucked in her pocket, while the left remains straight and immobile. She stares at him in the hallway, expression dim. "Hey, Rossi."
"Hey." The good left arm hooks high on the lintel, crooked to prop the elbow against the wood. Around the relaxed fall of that capable hand, Rossi inspects his visitor -- his gaze swings down, then sweeps back up, slow, deliberate -- before straightening to make room in the door's wide frame. Invitation, of a sort. "You look like crap."
This pose I'm a little more pleased with. I think I conveyed his pose well, and to my mind at least ('capable,' 'relaxed,' 'slow,' 'deliberate,' 'make room') there's a strong feeling of a physical body in control of itself and of its environment, power despite the crippling. There's innate physical domination in the way that he straightens to let her through, forcing her to push past him if she wants in, not so much to make her enter his personal space as to make her to allow him into hers.
Yes, I said he was trying to be fair, but c'mon. Fair doesn't necessarily mean kind. Pointing out that she looks terrible is not meant as mockery as it is an explanation. This is why you're being allowed in. You are in need, and I am responding. For all his assholedom, Rossi is incapable of not responding to a person in need, by whatever means seems best suited for the person. Tough love, compassion, charity, whatever; he may have given up the vocation of priest, but the personality traits that led to a calling for the Church still exist, under the cynical shell.
"Yeah," Sabby acknowledges, and her gaze on him brightens as she takes a single step forward. "Any idea why that might be?"
"Beats me," Rossi says, baritone neutral. He turns his shoulder into the wall, free hand hooking its thumb into the waistband of his pants, and leans again: into the wall, into support, the crutch an angular, awkward thing against the television behind him. "You been hanging out with the wrong crowd, maybe?"
Not a whole lot to say here, (he says again, and means it. Again.) Rossi snarks a bit, but it is his right, after all. In terms of self control he's doing well. He's not being threatening, his voice is disciplined, he is not in any way presenting a threat or expressing himself with the violence that he wants to. That will happen later. Given the fact that what Sabby says sounds like an accusation -- as though it's in some way his fault that she's gone through whatever it is that she's gone through -- he is, I think, justified in alluding OH SO SUBTLY to the fact that Sabby hangs out with, you know, terrorists. People who hijack planes are not allowed to blame him for getting what's eventually coming to them, even if they are friends. Pardon me. Friends who got him RAPED.
I like that Sabby's player reflected the differentiation between the light in the hallway and in the apartment. Light is one of those things that I really like to play with, though I haven't been as much in my ongoing attempt to avoid the purple. This is a shame. Baby got thrown out with the bathwater, I guess: I'll fix that in the future.
Sabitha moves into the apartment fully and turns to close the door carefully behind her, hand slipped free from her pocket for the task. When she turns again, it's slow, and she stares at him. "I need to use your phone."
The detective tips his head to the side table, burdened with keys and wallet and the post-its of escapades past, and -- more significant -- host to a phone. "Help yourself," he invites, pulling away at last to snag the crutch. "Can't say for sure the Feds aren't still listening in, but what the hell. Call up Kessler and get a little hot and heavy. It'll make their day."
He gives stuff away here in observing that the feds have tapped his phone and his apartment. Rossi owes nothing to the feds, personified by the FBI, and he owes even less to Sabitha. The two deserve each other -- and really, he expects that it's not news to Sabby either. The federal government can move with incredible speed when it sees fit, though the rest of the time it might move like molasses, and given the suddenness with which they swooped in and kicked his ass with the search and seizure warrant, he's bitterly presuming they have taken his investigation and carried it onto the next level.
What he's saying here has an overtone of a sneer to it, though Rossi himself isn't given to sneering. There are some things that Chris doesn't do: sneer. Smirk. I have a personal dislike for both words, the former because it's got a quality of -- I dunno, passive contempt? I like my contempt active, thank you. The latter I dislike because so many people use it, often without giving any impression that they know what the word means, much less that it's pejorative. At any rate, there's a quality of sneer to the words, one that isn't there in the pose itself. I like it when I'm able to convey that (and it could be just my imagination that I did manage to convey that, but we'll pretend I'm right!) simply by the word choice of dialogue. When the words that my character says in and of themselves, without description, manage to convey an attitude or a physical or vocal context? That's a score for me. Dialogue is one of my weak points, so I'll take any victories I can get.
I like Sabby's choice of the word 'stare.' Sabby stares at Rossi. One word conveys the kind of glazed, shell-shocked, subdued quality that I was imagining for her. Not to mention that it implies that she's looking at something new, or something fresh for the first time. Which in a sense she is: Rossi, the deceiver. The COP. I'm one of those people who suffer from adjective diarrhea, and from time to time it's good to be reminded that oftentimes, less is more.
Still, uh, working on that.
Meanwhile, I see that Sabitha wrote in her commentary for this scene that Rossi's apparent avoidance of the subject frustrated and irritated Sabby, and I can't help but think maybe there was a little vengeful awareness of that as well in Chris. He isn't above being petty, after all, and if she's passive-aggressive at him, he is, in his own way, getting a little of his own back by simply ignoring it. Nothing annoys a passive-aggressive more! ...unless it's being taken literally. Which the player tends to do. Neither of us deal well with PA.
Sabitha does not hesitate in taking Chris up on his offer. She snatches his phone with eager hands and then turns her back on the good detective to dial. A moment's pace carries her back toward the door in a vague semblance of privacy while it rings. Silence, and then it's obvious that she's speaking to a machine. "Hey. Matt-- hopefully you're ok. I hope-- he let me call from the car, so I hope you're ok. I'm fine. Nothing wrong. I'm at Chris Rossi's right now and-- I don't know where I'm going next, but I'll call you eventually. Maybe in a few days. Don't worry about anything, ok?" There's a long pause, and then Sabby finishes quietly, "I'll see you soon. Bye." The phone is thumbed off, and she turns to offer it mutely back to Rossi.
Rossi stuffs the crutch in his armpit, chin jerking back to the sideboard, likewise mute. Put it there. "Rough night?" he wonders politely, making his ungainly way towards the stereo and its happy chug of ballroom dance music. "If you need to use the shower, feel free. Not entirely sure the Feds aren't bugging that either, but they don't have much else to entertain them, lately. Knock yourself out."
Still the kindly host. Nice Chris. Go ahead. Use my shower. Invade my privacy more. I throw it open to you. Coals of fire, young lady. Need a towel to wipe off that ash?
There's very little to say here, but I'll say it anyway. The ballroom music I kept in because it was ridiculous, it was sound, and there's something very striking about silence when background noise cuts off. It has a dramatic effect, which I ended up using to punctuate the transition of the conversation from polite inconsequence (however laden with undercurrents) to direct confrontation.
"Rough few weeks," Sabby returns, instead dropping his phone into the cushion of a chair. Her gaze grows hard, her voice cool. "But then. I expect you'd know."
"Not everything," Rossi articulates, Brooklyn's accent drawling rich and sardonic at last. Music cuts off, leaving abrupt silence. He stands for a moment over it, his back broad and solid -- stiff, unreadable -- facing her. "I can guess a bit, though. Tough luck."
Here's a pose I did in absence rather than presence. Er, let me rephrase that. This pose emphasizes the absence of things. The absence of emotion up to now. The absence of music. The absence of real body language, since all Sabby gets is his back, opaque in expression except in the very fact that it's stiff and turned toward her. Absence, in short, of support and understanding and compassion and all those nice things that make Rossi a good person to have in your life ... if he likes you. Or if you're in trouble. No more trust. Sabby's forfeited that.
Tough luck could be read either way. Sympathetic. Dismissive. Given the quality of his voice, it's meant as the second of the two. He doesn't face her because doing so will pitch them into actual confrontation, and he's giving her this out, an opportunity to change the subject if she wants so they can coast over deeper waters until she's feeling more herself and less vulnerable.
He's so nice!
I like my pose. I like it for its silence and its stiffness, the counterpoint between the voice and its textures and apparent flippancy with the image of that unforgiving back. Less is more!
Sabitha's brows raise just slightly. Her posture stiffens, shoulder held firmly still while her opposite arm crosses around to curl fingers at her hip. "Luck? What's that saying you had about lightening, Chris?"
The black head turns, baring the profile, strong and angular in its Roman legacy. "Sometimes," Rossi says, and hooks his mouth in a humorless grin, "it really does strike twice. All that running, Melcross. What happened? You stand still too long?"
Like a lot of players, I worry from time to time that I use OOC information ICly. Part of the difficulty with this scene was that Rossi did read Sabby's journal, and there were things connected to those journals that might only make sense if you really knew what happened in the log. Well, of course I read the log, so paring out which bits were deductive and which parts were flat-out player knowledge was a bit rough. There are a couple of times when I went back after posing something went, oh, shit. Can I justify saying this? ...and I'm afraid that both times instead of going to the journal to verify my assumption, I went, "fuck it! It'll be good for the scene!" and did it anyway. I am a bad RPer. Considering the hatred I had for IC/OOC overlap, it's especially hypocritical of me. Mea culpa.
But you know what? I still say fuck it.
This is, in this moment, a flat out acknowledgment by Rossi that he has read Sabby's journal, and has no real shame in doing so. That she doesn't interpret it this way is not really surprising; it's not as forthright as one would reasonably expect from Rossi -- he seems more prone to things like, "Yo. I read your journal." On the other hand, for all his emotional pyrotechnics and combustive, often disastrous directness, he is actually a pretty complicated thinker. He is not unintelligent, and he's not incapable of subtlety. In that one pose, he basically encapsulates the entirety of Sabby's life as he's gleaned from her journal: she runs. She's a competitor in the race of the Red Queen, running as fast as she can just to stay in one place. Chris spends his entire life facing head-on anything and everything that gets thrown at him. As a result, I think he is more sensitive to it than others might be; he recognizes his opposite in what he's read. Running isn't, in and of itself, something to scorn. He accepts it as a perfectly valid, even intelligent way of living. What he can't forgive is that the running, as he sees it, permitted -- even approved of -- what happened to him as collateral damage in the interests of the race.
I like my pose, if not as much as the one before that. There's the profile and its shout back to the Italian heritage, which itself makes me think of marble busts. Strong, stone features. This is one of those scenes where I had a very real image of what Chris was doing with his body, and in its own way it says as much or more than what he's saying aloud. His back is still to Sabby, but his head is turned to the side so he can just barely acknowledge her in the periphery of his vision. He's not engaging, really. Not yet.
"You think you could at least do me the courtesy of /admitting/ that you set Homeland Security on me? Copied my fucking harddrive?" Sabitha's voice is even and quiet, barely changing with infliction despite the curses.
"Homeland Security's luck of the draw," Rossi says, turning to set his hips against the stereo's table. Green eyes, hard and cool, focus on the woman; his mouth, quick to smile, thins in a swift, hard line. "I didn't do that. They were bugging my apartment, trying to snag Magneto. The hard drive? Yeah. I did that. Figured turnabout was fair play. You got my mind; I got yours."
He still keeps a rein on his temper, which Sabby should seriously be grateful for. At no point during this scene does he truly lose it; there are a lot more things that he doesn't say and he doesn't do, partly because he's still aware that she's bruised and battered and fragile, and partly because he keeps a check on his personal demons insofar as he's capable. If he'd let go, he could have seriously hurt her. His pride, not to mention his sense of injury, refuses to let him become the bad guy in this scenario.
Also, he is a manipulator. It's sad, but it's true, that he knows how to push people's buttons -- and there's nothing like being dispassionate and self-controlled when someone else is upset at you, or getting upset at you. Sabby is an emotional creature (well, you know. She's a woman...) and he knows, because he knows her, that if he stays calm and collected, it will eventually drive Sabby nuts. I do not apologize for my character. He is what he is.
He's turned at last to face Sabby, so he's accepted the invitation to confrontation -- on his terms, which is how he prefers it. He's on his turf. He's in the right. It is, really, a bad place and time for her to bring this up with him, but that's her choice and she's made it, not him. He started out in the position of power by letting her opt out, by being the one who grants the choice, and now she's dived in. Well, then. Let's talk, sugarplum. And if we're going to rack up sins, let's first make it clear what he did and did not do, because he has no shame in what he's done, but he won't take credit for what others did. (Or is that blame? So hard to say!)
"I saved your fucking /life/," Sabby returns, and there's growing heat in her voice now.
"You know what your buddy Talhurst has to say about getting his mind wiped someday?" Rossi asks with conversational dispassion. The crutch's rubber tip sketches idle, formless runes on the hardwood floor, while over it, the detective studies Sabby with distant curiosity. "Could've done me the courtesy to put the bullet in my head, Melcross. Could've done me the courtesy to give me the choice."
After all this time, still Sabby has never really faced the enormity of what she did to Chris, or the consequences of her actions. Again with the running, always keeping one step ahead of acknowledging and paying. In the scales of Rossi's life as he's lived it, Life -- continued existence -- is secondary to other things. Existence without person, and the memories, personality, and purpose that make up that person, is intrinsically meaningless. I covered all this in the Windex Commentary, but the short version goes as follows. Though he may be a lapsed Catholic, Rossi is essentially a believer. He's one of the Faithful, without the trappings; he believes implicitly in the soul, without the religious jargon of spirituality. He's left the Church and planted himself, very determinedly, in the world of reality: mind and self have taken the place of soul, and to remove the former is the equivalent to losing the latter. In other words, Sabby really, but really screwed him over.
I'm not particularly pleased with this pose, or at least with parts of the pose. The last bit of dialogue, specifically. I remember intending to do the repetition of the last two sentences, repeating the "Could've" for both, but what sounded good in my head came out parsing poorly. Well, that's the way it goes. Experiments don't all end in success. There are bits of the rest of it that I like. The apparent diversion to Percy Talhurst, and the crutch lazily sketching random images on the floor. I used a little too much adjective-noun conjunction, especially given the type of noun, and that's a problem that I need to deal with in my RP: I'm too prone to adjectives, when there are so many other ways to create mood or imply scene than actually laying it out there in plain view for everyone to see. Chris is poorly served by his player. Sorry, Chris.
For the record, Percy would rather have died than let his brain be messed with. So would Chris. Having his brain erased wasn't a favor for him; it was, in his view, a selfish choice on Sabitha's part to keep herself out of trouble.
"It wasn't your fucking /choice/. You had-- you have no /idea/ what you were doing. What you were opening up." There's a pause, and Sabby drags in a choked breath, eyes bright on Chris. "What you /have/ opened up."
Rossi peels a tight smile. It glitters, faceted, a thing without warmth. "So why don't you tell me?"
If it had been an interrogation, he would've seized advantage of the moment to move in to get more information from her: been sympathetic, or understanding, or given her a perspective that would make the choice to tell him what he wanted to know the obvious thing. There would have been a relief in confessing. But this isn't the job, and he isn't a cop interviewing a witness; he's a man who's been betrayed in the worst way possible by a friend, and there's really nothing that he wants or even needs to know. His 'why don't you tell me?' isn't a real question for more information. It's a rhetorical one. He's expecting her to deny him this information, even given that she knows he's read her journal. He's expecting her to keep racing after the Red Queen, making one excuse after another out of her secrets.
In this he's not being entirely fair. He's aware (or thinks he's aware) of what Sabby's hiding. He doesn't know about the InCi, though he's aware of the connection with the HFC and Emma Frost. He knows what she is capable of, and he knows that there is a very real and present danger inherent in getting too close. He's experienced that. But it's hard to be fair when you're the one who was laid out as the sacrificial goat, and what he sees here in Sabitha isn't a friend trying to protect him, but a coward trying to protect herself and her TERRORIST GROUP.
They HIJACKED AIRLANES, y'all. He was a cop in the city when 9/11 happened. HIJACKING AIRPLANES IS NOT COOL.
"I can't tell you, Chris!" Sabby's declaration is almost a wail, and her fingers clinch tight on her arm. "Maybe they wouldn't kill you. Maybe it wasn't /your/ life. Maybe it was Julia's life I saved. Mikey's. Your mom, your dad's, Beston's. You don't fucking /know/, you /asshole/."
For the first time, heat. It roils behind the shuttered face, carving taut, restless anger down the line of body, through the rip of dark voice. "Don't give me that shit. Saving my life -- I /trusted/ you, Melcross. I fucking ... she erased me. She /erased me/. Do you have any fucking idea what that is? What it feels like? /Me/."
Now that she's cracked and been pushed beyond her limits, he can also let go a little. He's won -- except it's a hollow victory. Meaningless. Who's keeping score? Sabby has all these rationales for why she chose to do what she did, and given the time and the place and the circumstances, she probably (possibly?) did the right thing. For the Inner Circle. For her. Not for Chris, given how he feels about his mind, though even there there's the long-term reality: windexing he can recover from. Death he can't. Still. Her rationales come pouring out, and he shoots them down, not with logic, but with the single insurmountable truth. He trusted her. She betrayed him. She killed him in the worst way possible.
Sabby's commentary is that she never even considered it as being more than mild amnesia, like a blackout after a night of heavy drinking, and it's possible that it could have been that way -- but the combination of a lot of factors made it something other. And, also, you know. I played with it a bit. Uh. To put it mildly. On top of amnesia, there was the compulsion not to investigate. How messy is a compulsion not to investigate a group of mutants in a detective who investigates homicides and mutant activity? Where's the overlap? Is there overlap? Are there leads and clues that Rossi didn't follow or pick up on that got smudged by that compulsion? How can he know? There's the physical aspect of it, which smeared all his sexual encounters from then on, and contributed somewhat to his relationship with Leah. Would he have been with her if he hadn't been hamstrung by Emma? What part of it was a lie and what wasn't? There's the fear of female telepaths. How much of that bled over into his interactions with other mutants? Did he make decisions he wouldn't have if he hadn't been fearing mutants?
The point being that the impact of Sabby's decision -- to save his life, yes, but more than that -- has left Chris in a position where he doubts everything that he's been or done for the last few months. He no longer knows where he stands and who he is, and this is something that will take months, even years to deal with. His confidence is sorely shaken, and that piled on top of the lack of confidence inherent in recovering from a brutal assault in his own home ... well, for the first time in a long time, he's insecure. He's doubting himself. A lot. The next few months will be rough for him as he takes home the cases that he closed in the intervening months and second-guesses everything he does and did. He'll review his relationship with Leah and wonder how much of that was for real and how much the product of someone else's influence.
The pose reflects the fact that Rossi has pushed Sabby enough for her to lash out, and now he's free to let slip on his tight control as well. His passions tend to lean towards the fiery: smoke, flame, flashing. At the risk of breaking my arm patting myself on the back, I will note that I like the way this pose and the next one turned out. This one does, I think, a pretty good job of conveying the physicality: the tightness of his frame, the hum of anger across muscles. It starts to imply the very real threat of violence, which is a side of Chris that I don't think Sabby has never seen.
For the first time, doubt. Hesitation. It shows in expression, in tensed posture, and uncertainy carries in her tone even as she denies it. "She didn't erase you! She didn't touch-- it was just /this/. What was my better choice, Chris? To let you go digging into it? To let you ruin the lives of /everyone/ it touches? You touch? Was /that/ the better choice?"
"/Me/, Melcross." The scrape of old rage roughens the baritone, sharpening the peaks and angles of Rossi's accent. He straightens into a step; the table behind him rocks, teetering with the violence of that shove up and away. "She changed /me/. The things I think, the way I think, the way I feel, the way I -- /me/. She didn't erase a memory or two. She changed who /I/ am. A bullet would've been cleaner."
It's a telling blow, obviously, and Rossi pursues it ruthlessly. There's no conscious decision to bore in there, to push at that first crack. It's instinct, and completely automatic at that. Habit. As I said, I'm pleased about this pose and the way it turns out. It's the vocal corollary to the one above; the "scrape of old rage" is evocative, as is the -- hah, I actually used the "violence" there, though it wouldn't have been as effective without that "shove." Violence alone is telling, whereas using it in combination with the shove is showing.
While I'm not enthralled by my dialogue choices, I think it sounds fairly realistic, like the section before it. He stops, he starts, he breaks off what he's saying to forge ahead to the point. People don't talk in clean sentences. They stutter and find their way as they go, especially if they're having emotional upheaval, and that's certainly the case here.
Chris is not only angry at Sabby. He really wants her to acknowledge that she did something wrong here, and to admit that to his face. An apology. He wants an apology. He spends so much time dealing with people who refuse to be accountable for their own actions, and here, when it impacts him, he wants that. In time he does get that apology, but too late for it to do any good; just as he's relenting, Emma's amnesia wipes out the chance to mend those fences, and then Sabitha's gone.
"She didn't!" Sabitha insists, and her eyes sharpen brightly on Chris as he straightens. She does not take a step back, but the desire is there in the rising tenseness of her posture. "It was just the memories. The need to keep fucking /pushing/, when I asked-- when I /begged/ you to stop."
"What the fuck do you think I am? What the /fuck/ do you think I do?" The closed throat bleeds across the words, filling their empty shells with fury. Rossi takes a swift, unwary step, the pulse in his throat leaping across the race of accusation. "That's /me/. I push. That's who I /am/. You sold me out -- for what? Did your little song and dance, got Frost to get me up to that hotel room ... you have any idea what she did? What she /really/ did?"
Chris is a big guy, and when he gets angry, there's always that hint of violence just waiting under the surface that he has certainly used to intimidate people in the past. It's never been turned on Sabby though, which is the thing; she's never seen this side of him before. There is, if you think about it, a great deal of trust being placed on him here by her. She's trusting that he won't hurt her and that he won't do anything to her in a fit of temper -- in his own home, even, where there are no witnesses -- and whether that trust is because of her confidence in her own mutation or because she feels she knows what he's is and isn't capable of, still. It's more trust than he's willing to put in her, that's for damn sure.
As a player, I'm a pretty ... well, diminutive female, physically, though I straddle galaxies in spirit. As a female, and a small one at that, I admit that I quail a bit when I'm in a tense situation with a guy who's physically a lot larger than I am. It's not so much that I think said guy will actually hurt me, so much as the awareness of physical dominance is there. In a match-up, if it came down to violence, I would lose.
When writing Rossi I'm very aware of the converse of that. He's a manipulator, as I've said before. He knows his body and he knows his audience. It may be a little cruel of him to leverage that physical dominance, but he does because he can and because it's there and because it is, like everything else, a tool in his arsenal -- and one that he uses unconsciously, at this point. This is him. He pushes. In every sense of the word: mentally, verbally, personally, physically. If she had maintained a position of weakness from the outset, he probably wouldn't have pressed, but there you go. She met him head on, and now she shows signs of wanting to retreat. It would be irrational to expect him not to advance.
"You were going to get people /killed/!" Sabby insists angrily, with a ragged breath that's indrawn with desperate swiftness.
Teeth bare themselves in rigid recrimination. "Fuck me, Melcross: you should've had the balls to kill /me/. I /trusted/ you."
"I was trying to keep you /alive/!"
"/Ali--!/" The word chokes off. Rossi closes his hand, knuckles straining against the skin. Eyes blaze. "You killed me anyway. /Sabby/. You just didn't use a gun."
The rhythm of the poses change gradually until we get this short, brief exchange. I love that. I love that there's an ebb and flow to the poses that allows us to get from paragraphs to single lines, to that one sentence of Sabby's and then back out again. It's realistic. Placed against the backdrop of the longer poses, there's also the fact that shortened poses -- purely dialogue as these are -- increase the feeling of intensity to the scene. It's not so much a conscious decision on our parts as it is that Sabitha shortens, and I react accordingly, and she reacts to me, and so forth. Interaction and communication! This is the sort of thing that makes RP hot.
Ironically, for all this is such a raw and bleeding log, at the time we were RPing this, I recall that neither Sabby nor I were feeling on. We sort of limped through it at the time of play, felt a little disappointed in ourselves, and then when we went back and read it the next morning individually, we each had a little "Whoa!" moment. It happens. Rossi's logs with Percy all read well, but at the time we played them, we were writhing in abject misery. It's one of the strange quirks of this hobby of ours that you can have an ugly RP and still leave a beautiful corpse.
Back to the pose! Sabby's talk about getting people killed is -- well. It's not that Chris doesn't place credence in the possibility, but there is always that risk. In his line of work, Chris has brushed up against gangs and the mob, and the possibility of family and friends becoming collateral damage is something that one grows uncomfortably aware of during those kinds of cases. However, he has faith, if not in his ability to protect his loved ones (Leah!) at least in the ability of others to do it. NYPD looking after its own, or poodles if necessary. There's no such thing as a person who can't be gotten to, but like we've mentioned before, Chris faces everything head on. It's a Rossi family trait.
Sabby keeps coming back to that argument about keeping Rossi alive. In her commentary, she writes that it's because it's the justification for what she did, and that she clings to that: no harm, no foul. In Chris's eyes, however, it's the weakest argument there is, because of the way he views what windexing did and was.
Sabitha's head jerks back, rebounding from a blow that did not come physically. Her breath inward is ragged, and there's desperation in her voice as she insists, "I didn't. You were /fine/. It was /fine/."
The crutch skids, leaving a long line of matte across the polish of the wood floor. Rossi's jaw tightens, muscles leaping under the taut skin. "/Fine/." The word is an obscenity. "I read your diary. You didn't think it was /fine/ when you set me up. You thought she was insane. Remember? You thought she was unstable. You asked a crazy telepath to wipe out my memories."
This is the problem with picking a fight with someone who's read all your doubts about your own rationalizations. He'll throw them back in your face. Even though we wanked some data corruption so Rossi wouldn't find out about the Inner Circle (beyond logical suspicions, that is) there was enough there for him to know that Sabby and Percy thought Emma was seriously unstable. That they weren't sure it would go well. Unstable telepath picking through Rossi's brain? Gosh, that just gives him warm fuzzies.
At this point, Sabitha's argument that everything was "fine" only serves to enrage Chris further. She didn't think it was going to be fine. She thought things might go poorly, and she chose to do it anyway. At that point, she wasn't choosing between a dead Chris and a live Chris; she was choosing between Chris and the Inner Circle, and chose the latter. The fact that she picked windex was just a sop to her conscience and her perception of herself as a good person. The second Sabby says that about everything being fine, she opens up this whole other ugly chapter: not the consequences, but the intent behind the consequences. Whatever Sabitha thought she was doing when she made her decision, viewed through Chris's eyes, it wasn't what she convinced herself it was.
"You--" There's a moment's angry shock before Sabby's throat closes around further speech and she shakes her head hard. Tangled hair flies in her face, and strands cling as they catch on the corner of her mouth. She has, for the moment, no further reply.
"I got news for you, Melcross, in case Forge didn't pass it along. Your babysitter Talhurst? He had to leave halfway through. /He/ couldn't take it." The crutch spins, hurled aside to collide violently with the blank slate of wall. Dust shivers down in a smoky white haze. "Just me and the fucking crazy telepath. We had a /great/ time."
There's that word again. "Violently." I probably should've used a better word, but the pose itself is not bad. It's the first and only act of violence that Chris commits in this scene, and given the situation, it could've been a hell of a lot worse.
Excuse me while I twist my arm patting myself on the back. I'm always a little proud of myself when I remember to keep track of a prop.
Rossi's won this argument, I think. Even if Sabby could summon a convincing argument, she's already lost too much ground. I don't entirely remember what caused Chris to think that Percy was at the windexing to be a babysitter, but I believe it was a combination of Sabby's journal and reasonable deduction. He assumes that Percy was there to report everything back to Sabby, because even though he doesn't know about Percy's role as Bishop and all that entails, he does know how close the two of them are. It's a reasonable assumption. What isn't as reasonable is the assumption that Sabby wouldn't know that Percy left partway through, or that Emma wouldn't have told Percy what she did to Chris while Percy was gone.
HANDWAVE HANDWAVE HANDWAVE. Uh, we move on and ignore that little lapse of OOC knowledge into IC. (Sorry.) Dramatically it had this enormous impact, and I don't think Sabby will kill me for that utter failure as an RPer.
Fairly or unfairly, Chris absolutely blames Sabitha here for everything that happened, because he's angry and he's hurting and he's teetering on this precipice of self-doubt that he hasn't experienced since his partner got shot. And Sabitha is there. She's the one who waltzed into his apartment, pulled back the blanket and let out all the ugly, so she's the one who gets blamed. By the end of the scene he's cooled off enough to shift blame elsewhere: to himself, for one. Again with some justification -- but also not. There's a lot of self-blame that doesn't get expressed on-camera. As completely helpless as he was in the course of the windexing and Deadpool attack, his ego demands that he believe he wasn't helpless because others were stronger; he was helpless because he failed somewhere and allowed other people to do things to him. Rossi is a cop: he does unto others, not the other way around. It must have been his mistake. So now we have self-doubt, self-recrimination, and self-contempt. Trifecta! How exciting.
Sabitha flinches at the collision of crutch and wall, gaze following the hurl as if drawn by a magnet. A question hovers on her lips, unspoken for the moment while she turns wide, wild eyes back to Chris with a hitching catch of her breath, nearly a sob. And then she asks, unable to resist, on a hoarse whisper, "What did she do?"
Rossi snarls into the echoes of passion and question, turning on a cast-hobbled foot to limp towards the couch. Pain. The willful infliction of pain, to feed and thwart the tides of temper. "/Fuck/ you."
He doesn't realize that it's cruel for him not to tell her, but it's impossible for him to go into that. The humiliation! The degradation! He would, seriously? Rather die. (So childish!) Instead he brushes aside the question and leaves Sabitha with the worst that her own imagination can throw at her, with her knowledge of Emma Frost and what she thinks? knows? Emma is capable of doing. In fact, with the exception of Emma and Xavier, nobody ever learns from either of them -- except for Storm, who has to live with Emma's memories. Chris has no idea that Storm knows. If he found out, good God. I don't think he would be able to look her in the face again. EVER.
For the record? Sabitha's pose here is totally hot. It's a fantastic pose. Beautifully written, and so visual and aural, the emotions are clearly evoked and expressed. Sabitha's player does emo so damn well, and I seriously need to take lessons.
Sabitha stands motionless, staring after him for a long, silent, shaking moment. "What did they get from you?"
"All of it," Rossi tosses over his shoulder, his good hand gripping hard on the sofa's back, splinted arm pressed tight against his ribs. "Everything I had. Damned if I know what they're gonna do with it. I had you, Melcross." The gaze that swings up to fix on Sabitha is hostile, unfriendly, antagonism inseparably tangled with anger. Hurt. "I had your entire mutant groupie gang. Your /Hellions/. Cute name. Who thought that one up? Frost?"
The terror Sabitha fixes on Rossi now has nothing to do with his violent rage. Her voice hisses out on a whisper. "Everything? How far, Chris? Tell me how far."
Shoulders bow. The tousled head sinks. Somewhere in the shadowed harbor between arms and breast, Rossi curves a savage, hot-eyed grin. "Why?"
Smart move, not pressing the point. Change of subject!
I ... don't really have a whole lot to say about this. He isn't obligated to answer Sabitha -- in fact, he probably shouldn't -- but he wants to hurt her as much as she hurt him, (so mature, Chris!) and it's kind of like payback, telling her how bad it is, or even withholding that knowledge from her. You ran so hard and look at what that's come to. Now things are bad. Time to pay the piper.
Anger is so destructive. Tsk. Not thrilled by either of my poses there. Can't really remember what I was thinking. Uh. Let's go on, shall we?
"Because I need to know how bad it is." Sabby straightens, a forced shift in carriage in response to that grin while desperation flashes fear in her eyes.
"So you can start running again? Or maybe you can sacrifice someone else up on that altar of yours. Kessler seems like a good choice. He's solid. Lots of meat on those bones. You could bleed him for years."
Sabby as a vampire. Haha! Sabby's character was formed by a vampire, Sabella, so haha. Uh, it was funny in my head. Also, I don't think Sabby's player noticed, but it was a totally OOC shout out thingy, so ... I'm a big dork.
And you know, there's another point. Rossi automatically sides with Kessler against the mutant superduo of Percy and Sabitha. He and Matt: they're blue-collar, they're the same type, and despite the tensions and antagonism that the NYPD and the FDNY can have for each other, he'll close ranks with them against Sabby and her ilk. (Little does he know that Matt is a BIG FUCKING IDIOT who's already sided with the TERRORISTS -- but never mind about that.) Suggesting that Sabby would willingly and easily sacrifice Kessler in the name of her mutant group is just another way of hurting her. He's just another human. You won't care, will you, you evolutionary blight?
"So I can send them /away/." Sabby's voice drops, lowly pleaing in direct contrast to her stiff and straight posture. "If you read-- if you read it, you have to /know/. Chris. /Fuck/, Chris, you have to /know/!"
"I know you walked into it," Rossi says with bitter deliberation, voice hollowed by the chamber of his stoop. "I know you want out, but you can't make up your fucking mind to do anything about it. All that weeping and wailing, all that worrying; at the end of the day, Melcross, you made your choice. You sided with /them/."
He doesn't know, is the problem. There was a lot of data corruption, and some of the most conflicted entries in Sabitha's journal were also the ones that he couldn't read. But he read enough to understand the choice that she made, and regardless of whether it was motivated by fear or actual belief in the possibility of something good coming out of her choice, she made it.
"What would you have me do?" Sabby bites, and she closes on him for the space of two steps. "Tell me. /Please/. What is the better choice?"
"Get /out/. Turn them in. Step away. Anything else." Chris straightens, towering again; the fierce angles of his face are forbidding and set. "You didn't think for a /minute/ you were doing the right thing."
...and that would be one of the things that pushes Chris's buttons. He can forgive a lot -- really! -- but the willful decision to go with the easy way, or what he perceives as the easy way, following power and fear rather than one's own better angels: that's really unforgivable. It's the priest in him, and not the nice one that offers confession and absolution and all that jazz that Magneto knows, but the other one, all vengeancey and pissy. This is part of why he can tolerate Magneto, even knowing that the man is a murderer and a terrorist; the man knows what he's doing is not, shall we say, morally ideal, but he believes in the rightness of his intent, and he follows his conscience. It's not as incompatible with Chris's as Chris would like to think, unfortunately; Rossi has done his own time on the shady side in order to serve the greater good: a little perjury, a little over-the-line brutality, deals that shouldn't have been made, blind eyes that shouldn't have been turned. At the end of the day, the good outweighs the bad, and so he'll live with the moral ambiguity and his guilt.
The problem is that there's nothing of this in Sabby's journal. All he reads is her talking herself into things and the doubt and disgust for her own life -- and yet she keeps living it, because she's afraid to do something different. Again, fear is understandable. He can sympathize with fear! But when she turned Chris over to Emma -- heck, when she HIJACKED A PLANE, she crossed that line between the acceptable fear and the unacceptable cowardice.
"How? Tell me how to get out, Chris. Tell me. Please." Anger returns, heated and furious and bright as Sabby closes another step. "You have /no/ fucking /idea/ what you're talking about."
Heat flares again, subsided for a passing moment only to be fanned to life by Sabby's fire. "Yeah? How hard is it? Tell me, Melcross. What's stopping you from knocking on Frost's door and saying, hey. I want out. Erase me like you did Rossi and let me go. You ever even ask?"
Chris asks inconvenient questions!
Meanwhile, he doesn't really help Sabby much here, does he? But gosh, think about it. If it's acceptable for him to have his memories altered, what makes it unacceptable for Sabby to have hers? What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, right? Right?
...holy crap, I wrote a lot. Apparently I have to break this post up into two. Dammit.
Continued in Part 2.
Date: June 8, 2006
Players: Sabitha & Rossi
Continued in: Part 2
I promised this commentary to Sabitha's player a long time ago, but somehow never got around to it. Well. It's been a busy few months. However, good things come to those who wait, so I hereby present the commentary to the last in-memory interaction between Chris Rossi and Sabitha Melcross.
As it's been a while since I've done one of these, and we do have a few new people on the grid, I'll reprint my explanation for what a commentary is.
Commentaries began several months ago by the prompting of xmm_percy's player, who found the meme somewhere out there in the wild internet woods. They are, if you can imagine it, just like the commentaries provided on DVDs, where the director or the actors provide voiceovers over the action and the dialogue to give you further insight into the characters, the mechanics of the scene, the history behind why they did something one way as opposed to another, and so on, so forth. Log commentaries are the selfsame thing, except done on logs instead of on DVDs. They are purely OOC, as is the information in them, but from the OOC and the IC perspective, they allow you to discover things about your characters and their relationships, as well as explain and explore the RP that you do. From an outsider's point of view, it can just be fun to learn more about the characters that you interact with on the grid, even if that information is only educational, instead of useful.
That said, on with the commentary.
The scenario is as follows. This is the second to last time that Chris will encounter Sabby before she dies, though neither player realized that at the time. In fact, at the time this scene was done, there was no real intent for Sabby to die at all. The plotline is a complicated one and I won't go into it here -- the entire storyarc is listed and up, with a collection of logs, over here.
Magneto kidnapped Sabitha earlier in the week, and has just released her after a couple of days incarceration. The reason Sabitha was kidnapped is, of course, that the players of Sabitha and Magneto are massive twinks who shared a long car ride back from Canada together and quite possibly spent most of the drive smoking pot. Be that as it may, Sabitha is now free, and she is possessed of the knowledge that her friend -- pardon, her one-time friend, Chris Rossi -- effectively betrayed her trust. It's hard to say whose betrayal was greater: Sabitha betrayed Rossi to Emma Frost when she mistakenly put him on the track of the Hellions. This resulted in Rossi getting his mind wiped, which in turn led to psychological damage and suicidal tendencies until he was unwiped by Charles Xavier. He betrayed her trust to gain information on the Hellions once his memory was returned, a personal investigation that was later seized by the Feds and resulted in mutant identification technology ending up in the hands of the federal government and directly led to mutant registration.
There are two things to note about Sabitha's player, for those who are unfortunate enough never to have RPed with her.
- She has a rare ability, shared by maybe only four or five other players that I've known throughout a long RPing career, of creating chemistry with pretty much anybody. She can have chemistry with a brick if she so chooses. It's a talent that I'm jealous of.
- The scenes that I have had with Sabitha have been some of the most intense I've ever played. She is not shy about bringing out the raw emotion. This is one of the more intense scenes that Rossi has ever had on camera, and I consider it one of his best. Thanks, Sabby.
Sabitha hesitates in the hallway outside Christopher Rossi's apartment. Vincent's, apparently, has been discarded as a possible refuge, and she is giving deep thought to whether she ought to simply beg someone for change enough to call Percy for a ride home. Deep thought, eventually, loses out to something else, because Sabby's fist rises to rap sharply against Rossi's door, a demanding beat, and then falls back to her side. Sabby is not bruised or broken, except for the careful tilt of her left arm as she resists moving the shoulder too much. She's merely a bit dirty, hair a mess of tangles, clothes lived in for several days, and very, very tired. Circles smudge darkly under her eyes, and her expression is blank as she waits.
There is movement inside, a shuffle of minor proportions that jabs in time with a muffled beat. Conga pulses in the background, fed from a perverse radio; unstable on walking casts, Chris Rossi solemnly dances, dips his crutch, and bumps his shoulder into the wall beside the door. "Yeah," he calls through the wood, pressing his back into the plaster. "Who is it?"
I don't have a great deal to say about this first exchange of poses, and ... I will probably eat my words now. I usually do with this sort of thing. I start out with nothing to say and then fourteen paragraphs later I realize I should maybe move on to the next set of poses sometime this year.
Rossi's mood here is a bit precarious, but it's only been a few weeks since he got his memories back and discovered that someone that he considered a friend betrayed him. As a cynic, he rightly or wrongly considers himself at fault for putting himself in a position where it was possible for her to betray him; as a cop, he thinks he is in control of his reactions to the betrayal and the mental (and to some extent physical) rape that followed on the heels of that treachery. He should know better. He does know better, but he is a man, and a very masculine one at that, and the kind of violation he experienced isn't something that he can really understand or put into context with the kind of rape victims have to deal with all the time. Men -- straight, strong, cop men -- do not experience this sort of thing. They are, lamentably, the perpetrators when it happens to them at all. Perpetrators or friends/family of survivors. Never victims. He represses, he suppresses, and he struggles to deal with the feeling of helplessness and rage that he is left with in the wake of regaining his memories.
And as part of regaining power, he starts the investigation all over again. And he betrays Sabby, ripping off her hard drive under the pretext of a social call. He reads her journal. He finds out about her involvement. He reads her innermost thoughts.
Forge stuffs him in a closet. Well. This maybe did not help with his feelings of helplessness. He was a little pissed about that.
At any rate, his mood is precarious, like his temper, and since he's also recovering (hence the crutches) from an attack in his own home by Deadpool, he's not feeling particularly open to visitors, either. Ridiculously, he is dancing. Er. Yes. Let me explain about that.
The scene, the one I expected, wasn't going to be as intense as it turned out to be -- but it was going to be pretty serious, I knew that much. Sabitha knows Chris got her information; likewise, Chris knows she knows. Whether they choose to confront each other about that remained to be seen, but given that she was also returning from Magneto's captivity and was probably going to be feeling emotionally fragile, it stood to reason that this was going to be a really serious scene. Given that, the very small director in me tried to brighten the mood at the offset. The image of a physically crippled Chris sashaying the congo with his crutch was comical to me, and gave a lighter touch to contrast later drama. He has danced before on-camera, so this isn't completely out of the blue. Even a cop has a little rhythm.
Sabitha is silent for a moment, raising her hand to knock again at the door with heavy thunks. After a moment of this, she speaks. "Chris." As an answer, it is fairly incorrect.
One of the characteristics of playing with Sabitha (and with certain other players as well, though Sabitha's player is the one that leaps strongest to mind in this regard) is that it leans heavily towards the dialogue. Eventually during the course of any scene with her, we will end up losing a lot of the physicality of the scene and going dialogue redux, with mostly words and short, short poses, which makes for a faster tempo and -- given the experience of RP -- elevates the intensity of the scene. This is one of the few scenes with her where we haven't done that, though there is variation in the attention given to physical presence as opposed to vocal. My preference has always been for the physical, myself; where my char is, how he's standing, what he's doing, what he looks like. Between the two of us, we sort of maintained a good balance for this scene, I think, up until near the end.
Like the man said, "I don't know art, but I know what I like." The last sentence of Sabitha's pose is something I like, an example of meta done well. It's almost throwaway, but it has a narrative feel to it that doesn't intrude on either the setting or the outsider's perspective of the character. I have strong opinions about meta, mostly about meta that's done poorly. Sabby's player is one of the players who does it well. Her meta doesn't intrude, nor does it give me more information than I can work with. At the risk of sounding like one of those pretentious asshats who try to escalate RP to an art form and philosophy that it really doesn't deserve, I'll note that for me, a lot of the joy of RP is uncovering the mystery. Not being presented with everything on a little platter, but to work towards communication between characters, verbally and through body language. If I wanted a telepath's insight into a mind, I would play a telepath. In the very fact of being interactive, RP differs from the static process of reading a book: there is labor involved on both sides where two very different people try to connect. No cheating. This, to me, is the fun part about RP, and I think this is why I'm personally so against crystal skull meta. To be told OOCly what's going on in someone's mind through meta doesn't give me an IC clue towards communication. All it does is infuriate/exasperate/frustrate/bore. As I've mentioned before in other commentaries: sensuality isn't in the nudity, it's in the getting naked.
Okay. Uh. Off the soapbox and back to the actual RP.
It suffices. On the other side of the door, the cop sinks his head back against the wall, expression closing, eyes blanking and unfocusing. Silence, for a moment. The stiffened legs flatten his spine, shoulders squaring in abrupt tension. Then: "Yeah." And, as abrupt, "Hold on." Chains. Locks. Metal ripples and bolts back; the door flings open to bare Chris in sweats and sling. Green eyes squint. "Hey, Melcross."
I'm not a big fan of my pose here. I had the right idea, I think; the sentence structure tends toward the short and abrupt, cutting back on the longer phrases used in the initial set when everything was conga-y, but well. With the introduction of Sabitha, the loose and easy mood Chris was experiencing tightens and shuts down. He becomes wary. He becomes curt. The feeling for the pose is okay, and in and of itself it's functional, but there's an awkwardness to the description of the physical that doesn't especially impress me. Oh well.
In the last year or so I've tried hard to cut back on the purple in regards to Rossi RP. He is not a purple man! ...but I think I may have gone too far in the other direction. I'll have to think about that one.
Chris braces himself, both physically and mentally. This is, as I mentioned before, the first time that he's encountered Sabitha since both became aware of the other's knowledge. In the privacy of his own apartment, with no other eyes watching, he's able to express himself using his first and primary medium, the physical. I'm not sure if Chris's physicality is because I feel my strength is in the physical expression, but it works for him; he lives in his skin, and -- for him, at least -- the remainder of this scene is a picture of him controlling it. Not so much as he does in the interrogation room, say, or out on the field where he has to. He is capable of great discipline on duty. In his personal life, that's where things get a little debateable. More on that later.
His greeting to Sabitha is very commonplace, almost lackadaisical. Certainly neutral, with no overt hostility. This isn't so much because he's hiding or lying to her, which Sabitha later accuses him of, but because he takes in her appearance right off the bat and is, bizarrely, trying to be fair. He is aware that his reactions to her cannot possibly be even-keeled or rational, or free of emotional baggage. If it were the job, he'd take immediate advantage of the fact that she looks like she's been through the wringer, both physically and emotionally, to gain the other hand. In personal life he is (or at least tries to be) conscious of the tools that he uses on the job and tries to separate himself from them. With, I should add, indifferent success. You can't just turn on and turn off the way you deal with and handle people; they become part of your personality, part of your worldview. When he tries to separate himself from those skills he exercises as a cop, he starts becoming artificial -- even cold -- because it's someone other than who he is.
So given this moment and her appearance, he takes himself in hand and chooses to wait. He will not attack her, or confront her, or accuse her of anything until she is able to give back as good as she gets. There's no satisfaction in beating the weak. When he gets his moment to confront Judas, he wants to be the righteous one, not the one taking advantage. He does not want to feel sorry for her. So. Hey, Melcross.
Sabitha hunches her right shoulder forward, hand tucked in her pocket, while the left remains straight and immobile. She stares at him in the hallway, expression dim. "Hey, Rossi."
"Hey." The good left arm hooks high on the lintel, crooked to prop the elbow against the wood. Around the relaxed fall of that capable hand, Rossi inspects his visitor -- his gaze swings down, then sweeps back up, slow, deliberate -- before straightening to make room in the door's wide frame. Invitation, of a sort. "You look like crap."
This pose I'm a little more pleased with. I think I conveyed his pose well, and to my mind at least ('capable,' 'relaxed,' 'slow,' 'deliberate,' 'make room') there's a strong feeling of a physical body in control of itself and of its environment, power despite the crippling. There's innate physical domination in the way that he straightens to let her through, forcing her to push past him if she wants in, not so much to make her enter his personal space as to make her to allow him into hers.
Yes, I said he was trying to be fair, but c'mon. Fair doesn't necessarily mean kind. Pointing out that she looks terrible is not meant as mockery as it is an explanation. This is why you're being allowed in. You are in need, and I am responding. For all his assholedom, Rossi is incapable of not responding to a person in need, by whatever means seems best suited for the person. Tough love, compassion, charity, whatever; he may have given up the vocation of priest, but the personality traits that led to a calling for the Church still exist, under the cynical shell.
"Yeah," Sabby acknowledges, and her gaze on him brightens as she takes a single step forward. "Any idea why that might be?"
"Beats me," Rossi says, baritone neutral. He turns his shoulder into the wall, free hand hooking its thumb into the waistband of his pants, and leans again: into the wall, into support, the crutch an angular, awkward thing against the television behind him. "You been hanging out with the wrong crowd, maybe?"
Not a whole lot to say here, (he says again, and means it. Again.) Rossi snarks a bit, but it is his right, after all. In terms of self control he's doing well. He's not being threatening, his voice is disciplined, he is not in any way presenting a threat or expressing himself with the violence that he wants to. That will happen later. Given the fact that what Sabby says sounds like an accusation -- as though it's in some way his fault that she's gone through whatever it is that she's gone through -- he is, I think, justified in alluding OH SO SUBTLY to the fact that Sabby hangs out with, you know, terrorists. People who hijack planes are not allowed to blame him for getting what's eventually coming to them, even if they are friends. Pardon me. Friends who got him RAPED.
I like that Sabby's player reflected the differentiation between the light in the hallway and in the apartment. Light is one of those things that I really like to play with, though I haven't been as much in my ongoing attempt to avoid the purple. This is a shame. Baby got thrown out with the bathwater, I guess: I'll fix that in the future.
Sabitha moves into the apartment fully and turns to close the door carefully behind her, hand slipped free from her pocket for the task. When she turns again, it's slow, and she stares at him. "I need to use your phone."
The detective tips his head to the side table, burdened with keys and wallet and the post-its of escapades past, and -- more significant -- host to a phone. "Help yourself," he invites, pulling away at last to snag the crutch. "Can't say for sure the Feds aren't still listening in, but what the hell. Call up Kessler and get a little hot and heavy. It'll make their day."
He gives stuff away here in observing that the feds have tapped his phone and his apartment. Rossi owes nothing to the feds, personified by the FBI, and he owes even less to Sabitha. The two deserve each other -- and really, he expects that it's not news to Sabby either. The federal government can move with incredible speed when it sees fit, though the rest of the time it might move like molasses, and given the suddenness with which they swooped in and kicked his ass with the search and seizure warrant, he's bitterly presuming they have taken his investigation and carried it onto the next level.
What he's saying here has an overtone of a sneer to it, though Rossi himself isn't given to sneering. There are some things that Chris doesn't do: sneer. Smirk. I have a personal dislike for both words, the former because it's got a quality of -- I dunno, passive contempt? I like my contempt active, thank you. The latter I dislike because so many people use it, often without giving any impression that they know what the word means, much less that it's pejorative. At any rate, there's a quality of sneer to the words, one that isn't there in the pose itself. I like it when I'm able to convey that (and it could be just my imagination that I did manage to convey that, but we'll pretend I'm right!) simply by the word choice of dialogue. When the words that my character says in and of themselves, without description, manage to convey an attitude or a physical or vocal context? That's a score for me. Dialogue is one of my weak points, so I'll take any victories I can get.
I like Sabby's choice of the word 'stare.' Sabby stares at Rossi. One word conveys the kind of glazed, shell-shocked, subdued quality that I was imagining for her. Not to mention that it implies that she's looking at something new, or something fresh for the first time. Which in a sense she is: Rossi, the deceiver. The COP. I'm one of those people who suffer from adjective diarrhea, and from time to time it's good to be reminded that oftentimes, less is more.
Still, uh, working on that.
Meanwhile, I see that Sabitha wrote in her commentary for this scene that Rossi's apparent avoidance of the subject frustrated and irritated Sabby, and I can't help but think maybe there was a little vengeful awareness of that as well in Chris. He isn't above being petty, after all, and if she's passive-aggressive at him, he is, in his own way, getting a little of his own back by simply ignoring it. Nothing annoys a passive-aggressive more! ...unless it's being taken literally. Which the player tends to do. Neither of us deal well with PA.
Sabitha does not hesitate in taking Chris up on his offer. She snatches his phone with eager hands and then turns her back on the good detective to dial. A moment's pace carries her back toward the door in a vague semblance of privacy while it rings. Silence, and then it's obvious that she's speaking to a machine. "Hey. Matt-- hopefully you're ok. I hope-- he let me call from the car, so I hope you're ok. I'm fine. Nothing wrong. I'm at Chris Rossi's right now and-- I don't know where I'm going next, but I'll call you eventually. Maybe in a few days. Don't worry about anything, ok?" There's a long pause, and then Sabby finishes quietly, "I'll see you soon. Bye." The phone is thumbed off, and she turns to offer it mutely back to Rossi.
Rossi stuffs the crutch in his armpit, chin jerking back to the sideboard, likewise mute. Put it there. "Rough night?" he wonders politely, making his ungainly way towards the stereo and its happy chug of ballroom dance music. "If you need to use the shower, feel free. Not entirely sure the Feds aren't bugging that either, but they don't have much else to entertain them, lately. Knock yourself out."
Still the kindly host. Nice Chris. Go ahead. Use my shower. Invade my privacy more. I throw it open to you. Coals of fire, young lady. Need a towel to wipe off that ash?
There's very little to say here, but I'll say it anyway. The ballroom music I kept in because it was ridiculous, it was sound, and there's something very striking about silence when background noise cuts off. It has a dramatic effect, which I ended up using to punctuate the transition of the conversation from polite inconsequence (however laden with undercurrents) to direct confrontation.
"Rough few weeks," Sabby returns, instead dropping his phone into the cushion of a chair. Her gaze grows hard, her voice cool. "But then. I expect you'd know."
"Not everything," Rossi articulates, Brooklyn's accent drawling rich and sardonic at last. Music cuts off, leaving abrupt silence. He stands for a moment over it, his back broad and solid -- stiff, unreadable -- facing her. "I can guess a bit, though. Tough luck."
Here's a pose I did in absence rather than presence. Er, let me rephrase that. This pose emphasizes the absence of things. The absence of emotion up to now. The absence of music. The absence of real body language, since all Sabby gets is his back, opaque in expression except in the very fact that it's stiff and turned toward her. Absence, in short, of support and understanding and compassion and all those nice things that make Rossi a good person to have in your life ... if he likes you. Or if you're in trouble. No more trust. Sabby's forfeited that.
Tough luck could be read either way. Sympathetic. Dismissive. Given the quality of his voice, it's meant as the second of the two. He doesn't face her because doing so will pitch them into actual confrontation, and he's giving her this out, an opportunity to change the subject if she wants so they can coast over deeper waters until she's feeling more herself and less vulnerable.
He's so nice!
I like my pose. I like it for its silence and its stiffness, the counterpoint between the voice and its textures and apparent flippancy with the image of that unforgiving back. Less is more!
Sabitha's brows raise just slightly. Her posture stiffens, shoulder held firmly still while her opposite arm crosses around to curl fingers at her hip. "Luck? What's that saying you had about lightening, Chris?"
The black head turns, baring the profile, strong and angular in its Roman legacy. "Sometimes," Rossi says, and hooks his mouth in a humorless grin, "it really does strike twice. All that running, Melcross. What happened? You stand still too long?"
Like a lot of players, I worry from time to time that I use OOC information ICly. Part of the difficulty with this scene was that Rossi did read Sabby's journal, and there were things connected to those journals that might only make sense if you really knew what happened in the log. Well, of course I read the log, so paring out which bits were deductive and which parts were flat-out player knowledge was a bit rough. There are a couple of times when I went back after posing something went, oh, shit. Can I justify saying this? ...and I'm afraid that both times instead of going to the journal to verify my assumption, I went, "fuck it! It'll be good for the scene!" and did it anyway. I am a bad RPer. Considering the hatred I had for IC/OOC overlap, it's especially hypocritical of me. Mea culpa.
But you know what? I still say fuck it.
This is, in this moment, a flat out acknowledgment by Rossi that he has read Sabby's journal, and has no real shame in doing so. That she doesn't interpret it this way is not really surprising; it's not as forthright as one would reasonably expect from Rossi -- he seems more prone to things like, "Yo. I read your journal." On the other hand, for all his emotional pyrotechnics and combustive, often disastrous directness, he is actually a pretty complicated thinker. He is not unintelligent, and he's not incapable of subtlety. In that one pose, he basically encapsulates the entirety of Sabby's life as he's gleaned from her journal: she runs. She's a competitor in the race of the Red Queen, running as fast as she can just to stay in one place. Chris spends his entire life facing head-on anything and everything that gets thrown at him. As a result, I think he is more sensitive to it than others might be; he recognizes his opposite in what he's read. Running isn't, in and of itself, something to scorn. He accepts it as a perfectly valid, even intelligent way of living. What he can't forgive is that the running, as he sees it, permitted -- even approved of -- what happened to him as collateral damage in the interests of the race.
I like my pose, if not as much as the one before that. There's the profile and its shout back to the Italian heritage, which itself makes me think of marble busts. Strong, stone features. This is one of those scenes where I had a very real image of what Chris was doing with his body, and in its own way it says as much or more than what he's saying aloud. His back is still to Sabby, but his head is turned to the side so he can just barely acknowledge her in the periphery of his vision. He's not engaging, really. Not yet.
"You think you could at least do me the courtesy of /admitting/ that you set Homeland Security on me? Copied my fucking harddrive?" Sabitha's voice is even and quiet, barely changing with infliction despite the curses.
"Homeland Security's luck of the draw," Rossi says, turning to set his hips against the stereo's table. Green eyes, hard and cool, focus on the woman; his mouth, quick to smile, thins in a swift, hard line. "I didn't do that. They were bugging my apartment, trying to snag Magneto. The hard drive? Yeah. I did that. Figured turnabout was fair play. You got my mind; I got yours."
He still keeps a rein on his temper, which Sabby should seriously be grateful for. At no point during this scene does he truly lose it; there are a lot more things that he doesn't say and he doesn't do, partly because he's still aware that she's bruised and battered and fragile, and partly because he keeps a check on his personal demons insofar as he's capable. If he'd let go, he could have seriously hurt her. His pride, not to mention his sense of injury, refuses to let him become the bad guy in this scenario.
Also, he is a manipulator. It's sad, but it's true, that he knows how to push people's buttons -- and there's nothing like being dispassionate and self-controlled when someone else is upset at you, or getting upset at you. Sabby is an emotional creature (well, you know. She's a woman...) and he knows, because he knows her, that if he stays calm and collected, it will eventually drive Sabby nuts. I do not apologize for my character. He is what he is.
He's turned at last to face Sabby, so he's accepted the invitation to confrontation -- on his terms, which is how he prefers it. He's on his turf. He's in the right. It is, really, a bad place and time for her to bring this up with him, but that's her choice and she's made it, not him. He started out in the position of power by letting her opt out, by being the one who grants the choice, and now she's dived in. Well, then. Let's talk, sugarplum. And if we're going to rack up sins, let's first make it clear what he did and did not do, because he has no shame in what he's done, but he won't take credit for what others did. (Or is that blame? So hard to say!)
"I saved your fucking /life/," Sabby returns, and there's growing heat in her voice now.
"You know what your buddy Talhurst has to say about getting his mind wiped someday?" Rossi asks with conversational dispassion. The crutch's rubber tip sketches idle, formless runes on the hardwood floor, while over it, the detective studies Sabby with distant curiosity. "Could've done me the courtesy to put the bullet in my head, Melcross. Could've done me the courtesy to give me the choice."
After all this time, still Sabby has never really faced the enormity of what she did to Chris, or the consequences of her actions. Again with the running, always keeping one step ahead of acknowledging and paying. In the scales of Rossi's life as he's lived it, Life -- continued existence -- is secondary to other things. Existence without person, and the memories, personality, and purpose that make up that person, is intrinsically meaningless. I covered all this in the Windex Commentary, but the short version goes as follows. Though he may be a lapsed Catholic, Rossi is essentially a believer. He's one of the Faithful, without the trappings; he believes implicitly in the soul, without the religious jargon of spirituality. He's left the Church and planted himself, very determinedly, in the world of reality: mind and self have taken the place of soul, and to remove the former is the equivalent to losing the latter. In other words, Sabby really, but really screwed him over.
I'm not particularly pleased with this pose, or at least with parts of the pose. The last bit of dialogue, specifically. I remember intending to do the repetition of the last two sentences, repeating the "Could've" for both, but what sounded good in my head came out parsing poorly. Well, that's the way it goes. Experiments don't all end in success. There are bits of the rest of it that I like. The apparent diversion to Percy Talhurst, and the crutch lazily sketching random images on the floor. I used a little too much adjective-noun conjunction, especially given the type of noun, and that's a problem that I need to deal with in my RP: I'm too prone to adjectives, when there are so many other ways to create mood or imply scene than actually laying it out there in plain view for everyone to see. Chris is poorly served by his player. Sorry, Chris.
For the record, Percy would rather have died than let his brain be messed with. So would Chris. Having his brain erased wasn't a favor for him; it was, in his view, a selfish choice on Sabitha's part to keep herself out of trouble.
"It wasn't your fucking /choice/. You had-- you have no /idea/ what you were doing. What you were opening up." There's a pause, and Sabby drags in a choked breath, eyes bright on Chris. "What you /have/ opened up."
Rossi peels a tight smile. It glitters, faceted, a thing without warmth. "So why don't you tell me?"
If it had been an interrogation, he would've seized advantage of the moment to move in to get more information from her: been sympathetic, or understanding, or given her a perspective that would make the choice to tell him what he wanted to know the obvious thing. There would have been a relief in confessing. But this isn't the job, and he isn't a cop interviewing a witness; he's a man who's been betrayed in the worst way possible by a friend, and there's really nothing that he wants or even needs to know. His 'why don't you tell me?' isn't a real question for more information. It's a rhetorical one. He's expecting her to deny him this information, even given that she knows he's read her journal. He's expecting her to keep racing after the Red Queen, making one excuse after another out of her secrets.
In this he's not being entirely fair. He's aware (or thinks he's aware) of what Sabby's hiding. He doesn't know about the InCi, though he's aware of the connection with the HFC and Emma Frost. He knows what she is capable of, and he knows that there is a very real and present danger inherent in getting too close. He's experienced that. But it's hard to be fair when you're the one who was laid out as the sacrificial goat, and what he sees here in Sabitha isn't a friend trying to protect him, but a coward trying to protect herself and her TERRORIST GROUP.
They HIJACKED AIRLANES, y'all. He was a cop in the city when 9/11 happened. HIJACKING AIRPLANES IS NOT COOL.
"I can't tell you, Chris!" Sabby's declaration is almost a wail, and her fingers clinch tight on her arm. "Maybe they wouldn't kill you. Maybe it wasn't /your/ life. Maybe it was Julia's life I saved. Mikey's. Your mom, your dad's, Beston's. You don't fucking /know/, you /asshole/."
For the first time, heat. It roils behind the shuttered face, carving taut, restless anger down the line of body, through the rip of dark voice. "Don't give me that shit. Saving my life -- I /trusted/ you, Melcross. I fucking ... she erased me. She /erased me/. Do you have any fucking idea what that is? What it feels like? /Me/."
Now that she's cracked and been pushed beyond her limits, he can also let go a little. He's won -- except it's a hollow victory. Meaningless. Who's keeping score? Sabby has all these rationales for why she chose to do what she did, and given the time and the place and the circumstances, she probably (possibly?) did the right thing. For the Inner Circle. For her. Not for Chris, given how he feels about his mind, though even there there's the long-term reality: windexing he can recover from. Death he can't. Still. Her rationales come pouring out, and he shoots them down, not with logic, but with the single insurmountable truth. He trusted her. She betrayed him. She killed him in the worst way possible.
Sabby's commentary is that she never even considered it as being more than mild amnesia, like a blackout after a night of heavy drinking, and it's possible that it could have been that way -- but the combination of a lot of factors made it something other. And, also, you know. I played with it a bit. Uh. To put it mildly. On top of amnesia, there was the compulsion not to investigate. How messy is a compulsion not to investigate a group of mutants in a detective who investigates homicides and mutant activity? Where's the overlap? Is there overlap? Are there leads and clues that Rossi didn't follow or pick up on that got smudged by that compulsion? How can he know? There's the physical aspect of it, which smeared all his sexual encounters from then on, and contributed somewhat to his relationship with Leah. Would he have been with her if he hadn't been hamstrung by Emma? What part of it was a lie and what wasn't? There's the fear of female telepaths. How much of that bled over into his interactions with other mutants? Did he make decisions he wouldn't have if he hadn't been fearing mutants?
The point being that the impact of Sabby's decision -- to save his life, yes, but more than that -- has left Chris in a position where he doubts everything that he's been or done for the last few months. He no longer knows where he stands and who he is, and this is something that will take months, even years to deal with. His confidence is sorely shaken, and that piled on top of the lack of confidence inherent in recovering from a brutal assault in his own home ... well, for the first time in a long time, he's insecure. He's doubting himself. A lot. The next few months will be rough for him as he takes home the cases that he closed in the intervening months and second-guesses everything he does and did. He'll review his relationship with Leah and wonder how much of that was for real and how much the product of someone else's influence.
The pose reflects the fact that Rossi has pushed Sabby enough for her to lash out, and now he's free to let slip on his tight control as well. His passions tend to lean towards the fiery: smoke, flame, flashing. At the risk of breaking my arm patting myself on the back, I will note that I like the way this pose and the next one turned out. This one does, I think, a pretty good job of conveying the physicality: the tightness of his frame, the hum of anger across muscles. It starts to imply the very real threat of violence, which is a side of Chris that I don't think Sabby has never seen.
For the first time, doubt. Hesitation. It shows in expression, in tensed posture, and uncertainy carries in her tone even as she denies it. "She didn't erase you! She didn't touch-- it was just /this/. What was my better choice, Chris? To let you go digging into it? To let you ruin the lives of /everyone/ it touches? You touch? Was /that/ the better choice?"
"/Me/, Melcross." The scrape of old rage roughens the baritone, sharpening the peaks and angles of Rossi's accent. He straightens into a step; the table behind him rocks, teetering with the violence of that shove up and away. "She changed /me/. The things I think, the way I think, the way I feel, the way I -- /me/. She didn't erase a memory or two. She changed who /I/ am. A bullet would've been cleaner."
It's a telling blow, obviously, and Rossi pursues it ruthlessly. There's no conscious decision to bore in there, to push at that first crack. It's instinct, and completely automatic at that. Habit. As I said, I'm pleased about this pose and the way it turns out. It's the vocal corollary to the one above; the "scrape of old rage" is evocative, as is the -- hah, I actually used the "violence" there, though it wouldn't have been as effective without that "shove." Violence alone is telling, whereas using it in combination with the shove is showing.
While I'm not enthralled by my dialogue choices, I think it sounds fairly realistic, like the section before it. He stops, he starts, he breaks off what he's saying to forge ahead to the point. People don't talk in clean sentences. They stutter and find their way as they go, especially if they're having emotional upheaval, and that's certainly the case here.
Chris is not only angry at Sabby. He really wants her to acknowledge that she did something wrong here, and to admit that to his face. An apology. He wants an apology. He spends so much time dealing with people who refuse to be accountable for their own actions, and here, when it impacts him, he wants that. In time he does get that apology, but too late for it to do any good; just as he's relenting, Emma's amnesia wipes out the chance to mend those fences, and then Sabitha's gone.
"She didn't!" Sabitha insists, and her eyes sharpen brightly on Chris as he straightens. She does not take a step back, but the desire is there in the rising tenseness of her posture. "It was just the memories. The need to keep fucking /pushing/, when I asked-- when I /begged/ you to stop."
"What the fuck do you think I am? What the /fuck/ do you think I do?" The closed throat bleeds across the words, filling their empty shells with fury. Rossi takes a swift, unwary step, the pulse in his throat leaping across the race of accusation. "That's /me/. I push. That's who I /am/. You sold me out -- for what? Did your little song and dance, got Frost to get me up to that hotel room ... you have any idea what she did? What she /really/ did?"
Chris is a big guy, and when he gets angry, there's always that hint of violence just waiting under the surface that he has certainly used to intimidate people in the past. It's never been turned on Sabby though, which is the thing; she's never seen this side of him before. There is, if you think about it, a great deal of trust being placed on him here by her. She's trusting that he won't hurt her and that he won't do anything to her in a fit of temper -- in his own home, even, where there are no witnesses -- and whether that trust is because of her confidence in her own mutation or because she feels she knows what he's is and isn't capable of, still. It's more trust than he's willing to put in her, that's for damn sure.
As a player, I'm a pretty ... well, diminutive female, physically, though I straddle galaxies in spirit. As a female, and a small one at that, I admit that I quail a bit when I'm in a tense situation with a guy who's physically a lot larger than I am. It's not so much that I think said guy will actually hurt me, so much as the awareness of physical dominance is there. In a match-up, if it came down to violence, I would lose.
When writing Rossi I'm very aware of the converse of that. He's a manipulator, as I've said before. He knows his body and he knows his audience. It may be a little cruel of him to leverage that physical dominance, but he does because he can and because it's there and because it is, like everything else, a tool in his arsenal -- and one that he uses unconsciously, at this point. This is him. He pushes. In every sense of the word: mentally, verbally, personally, physically. If she had maintained a position of weakness from the outset, he probably wouldn't have pressed, but there you go. She met him head on, and now she shows signs of wanting to retreat. It would be irrational to expect him not to advance.
"You were going to get people /killed/!" Sabby insists angrily, with a ragged breath that's indrawn with desperate swiftness.
Teeth bare themselves in rigid recrimination. "Fuck me, Melcross: you should've had the balls to kill /me/. I /trusted/ you."
"I was trying to keep you /alive/!"
"/Ali--!/" The word chokes off. Rossi closes his hand, knuckles straining against the skin. Eyes blaze. "You killed me anyway. /Sabby/. You just didn't use a gun."
The rhythm of the poses change gradually until we get this short, brief exchange. I love that. I love that there's an ebb and flow to the poses that allows us to get from paragraphs to single lines, to that one sentence of Sabby's and then back out again. It's realistic. Placed against the backdrop of the longer poses, there's also the fact that shortened poses -- purely dialogue as these are -- increase the feeling of intensity to the scene. It's not so much a conscious decision on our parts as it is that Sabitha shortens, and I react accordingly, and she reacts to me, and so forth. Interaction and communication! This is the sort of thing that makes RP hot.
Ironically, for all this is such a raw and bleeding log, at the time we were RPing this, I recall that neither Sabby nor I were feeling on. We sort of limped through it at the time of play, felt a little disappointed in ourselves, and then when we went back and read it the next morning individually, we each had a little "Whoa!" moment. It happens. Rossi's logs with Percy all read well, but at the time we played them, we were writhing in abject misery. It's one of the strange quirks of this hobby of ours that you can have an ugly RP and still leave a beautiful corpse.
Back to the pose! Sabby's talk about getting people killed is -- well. It's not that Chris doesn't place credence in the possibility, but there is always that risk. In his line of work, Chris has brushed up against gangs and the mob, and the possibility of family and friends becoming collateral damage is something that one grows uncomfortably aware of during those kinds of cases. However, he has faith, if not in his ability to protect his loved ones (Leah!) at least in the ability of others to do it. NYPD looking after its own, or poodles if necessary. There's no such thing as a person who can't be gotten to, but like we've mentioned before, Chris faces everything head on. It's a Rossi family trait.
Sabby keeps coming back to that argument about keeping Rossi alive. In her commentary, she writes that it's because it's the justification for what she did, and that she clings to that: no harm, no foul. In Chris's eyes, however, it's the weakest argument there is, because of the way he views what windexing did and was.
Sabitha's head jerks back, rebounding from a blow that did not come physically. Her breath inward is ragged, and there's desperation in her voice as she insists, "I didn't. You were /fine/. It was /fine/."
The crutch skids, leaving a long line of matte across the polish of the wood floor. Rossi's jaw tightens, muscles leaping under the taut skin. "/Fine/." The word is an obscenity. "I read your diary. You didn't think it was /fine/ when you set me up. You thought she was insane. Remember? You thought she was unstable. You asked a crazy telepath to wipe out my memories."
This is the problem with picking a fight with someone who's read all your doubts about your own rationalizations. He'll throw them back in your face. Even though we wanked some data corruption so Rossi wouldn't find out about the Inner Circle (beyond logical suspicions, that is) there was enough there for him to know that Sabby and Percy thought Emma was seriously unstable. That they weren't sure it would go well. Unstable telepath picking through Rossi's brain? Gosh, that just gives him warm fuzzies.
At this point, Sabitha's argument that everything was "fine" only serves to enrage Chris further. She didn't think it was going to be fine. She thought things might go poorly, and she chose to do it anyway. At that point, she wasn't choosing between a dead Chris and a live Chris; she was choosing between Chris and the Inner Circle, and chose the latter. The fact that she picked windex was just a sop to her conscience and her perception of herself as a good person. The second Sabby says that about everything being fine, she opens up this whole other ugly chapter: not the consequences, but the intent behind the consequences. Whatever Sabitha thought she was doing when she made her decision, viewed through Chris's eyes, it wasn't what she convinced herself it was.
"You--" There's a moment's angry shock before Sabby's throat closes around further speech and she shakes her head hard. Tangled hair flies in her face, and strands cling as they catch on the corner of her mouth. She has, for the moment, no further reply.
"I got news for you, Melcross, in case Forge didn't pass it along. Your babysitter Talhurst? He had to leave halfway through. /He/ couldn't take it." The crutch spins, hurled aside to collide violently with the blank slate of wall. Dust shivers down in a smoky white haze. "Just me and the fucking crazy telepath. We had a /great/ time."
There's that word again. "Violently." I probably should've used a better word, but the pose itself is not bad. It's the first and only act of violence that Chris commits in this scene, and given the situation, it could've been a hell of a lot worse.
Excuse me while I twist my arm patting myself on the back. I'm always a little proud of myself when I remember to keep track of a prop.
Rossi's won this argument, I think. Even if Sabby could summon a convincing argument, she's already lost too much ground. I don't entirely remember what caused Chris to think that Percy was at the windexing to be a babysitter, but I believe it was a combination of Sabby's journal and reasonable deduction. He assumes that Percy was there to report everything back to Sabby, because even though he doesn't know about Percy's role as Bishop and all that entails, he does know how close the two of them are. It's a reasonable assumption. What isn't as reasonable is the assumption that Sabby wouldn't know that Percy left partway through, or that Emma wouldn't have told Percy what she did to Chris while Percy was gone.
HANDWAVE HANDWAVE HANDWAVE. Uh, we move on and ignore that little lapse of OOC knowledge into IC. (Sorry.) Dramatically it had this enormous impact, and I don't think Sabby will kill me for that utter failure as an RPer.
Fairly or unfairly, Chris absolutely blames Sabitha here for everything that happened, because he's angry and he's hurting and he's teetering on this precipice of self-doubt that he hasn't experienced since his partner got shot. And Sabitha is there. She's the one who waltzed into his apartment, pulled back the blanket and let out all the ugly, so she's the one who gets blamed. By the end of the scene he's cooled off enough to shift blame elsewhere: to himself, for one. Again with some justification -- but also not. There's a lot of self-blame that doesn't get expressed on-camera. As completely helpless as he was in the course of the windexing and Deadpool attack, his ego demands that he believe he wasn't helpless because others were stronger; he was helpless because he failed somewhere and allowed other people to do things to him. Rossi is a cop: he does unto others, not the other way around. It must have been his mistake. So now we have self-doubt, self-recrimination, and self-contempt. Trifecta! How exciting.
Sabitha flinches at the collision of crutch and wall, gaze following the hurl as if drawn by a magnet. A question hovers on her lips, unspoken for the moment while she turns wide, wild eyes back to Chris with a hitching catch of her breath, nearly a sob. And then she asks, unable to resist, on a hoarse whisper, "What did she do?"
Rossi snarls into the echoes of passion and question, turning on a cast-hobbled foot to limp towards the couch. Pain. The willful infliction of pain, to feed and thwart the tides of temper. "/Fuck/ you."
He doesn't realize that it's cruel for him not to tell her, but it's impossible for him to go into that. The humiliation! The degradation! He would, seriously? Rather die. (So childish!) Instead he brushes aside the question and leaves Sabitha with the worst that her own imagination can throw at her, with her knowledge of Emma Frost and what she thinks? knows? Emma is capable of doing. In fact, with the exception of Emma and Xavier, nobody ever learns from either of them -- except for Storm, who has to live with Emma's memories. Chris has no idea that Storm knows. If he found out, good God. I don't think he would be able to look her in the face again. EVER.
For the record? Sabitha's pose here is totally hot. It's a fantastic pose. Beautifully written, and so visual and aural, the emotions are clearly evoked and expressed. Sabitha's player does emo so damn well, and I seriously need to take lessons.
Sabitha stands motionless, staring after him for a long, silent, shaking moment. "What did they get from you?"
"All of it," Rossi tosses over his shoulder, his good hand gripping hard on the sofa's back, splinted arm pressed tight against his ribs. "Everything I had. Damned if I know what they're gonna do with it. I had you, Melcross." The gaze that swings up to fix on Sabitha is hostile, unfriendly, antagonism inseparably tangled with anger. Hurt. "I had your entire mutant groupie gang. Your /Hellions/. Cute name. Who thought that one up? Frost?"
The terror Sabitha fixes on Rossi now has nothing to do with his violent rage. Her voice hisses out on a whisper. "Everything? How far, Chris? Tell me how far."
Shoulders bow. The tousled head sinks. Somewhere in the shadowed harbor between arms and breast, Rossi curves a savage, hot-eyed grin. "Why?"
Smart move, not pressing the point. Change of subject!
I ... don't really have a whole lot to say about this. He isn't obligated to answer Sabitha -- in fact, he probably shouldn't -- but he wants to hurt her as much as she hurt him, (so mature, Chris!) and it's kind of like payback, telling her how bad it is, or even withholding that knowledge from her. You ran so hard and look at what that's come to. Now things are bad. Time to pay the piper.
Anger is so destructive. Tsk. Not thrilled by either of my poses there. Can't really remember what I was thinking. Uh. Let's go on, shall we?
"Because I need to know how bad it is." Sabby straightens, a forced shift in carriage in response to that grin while desperation flashes fear in her eyes.
"So you can start running again? Or maybe you can sacrifice someone else up on that altar of yours. Kessler seems like a good choice. He's solid. Lots of meat on those bones. You could bleed him for years."
Sabby as a vampire. Haha! Sabby's character was formed by a vampire, Sabella, so haha. Uh, it was funny in my head. Also, I don't think Sabby's player noticed, but it was a totally OOC shout out thingy, so ... I'm a big dork.
And you know, there's another point. Rossi automatically sides with Kessler against the mutant superduo of Percy and Sabitha. He and Matt: they're blue-collar, they're the same type, and despite the tensions and antagonism that the NYPD and the FDNY can have for each other, he'll close ranks with them against Sabby and her ilk. (Little does he know that Matt is a BIG FUCKING IDIOT who's already sided with the TERRORISTS -- but never mind about that.) Suggesting that Sabby would willingly and easily sacrifice Kessler in the name of her mutant group is just another way of hurting her. He's just another human. You won't care, will you, you evolutionary blight?
"So I can send them /away/." Sabby's voice drops, lowly pleaing in direct contrast to her stiff and straight posture. "If you read-- if you read it, you have to /know/. Chris. /Fuck/, Chris, you have to /know/!"
"I know you walked into it," Rossi says with bitter deliberation, voice hollowed by the chamber of his stoop. "I know you want out, but you can't make up your fucking mind to do anything about it. All that weeping and wailing, all that worrying; at the end of the day, Melcross, you made your choice. You sided with /them/."
He doesn't know, is the problem. There was a lot of data corruption, and some of the most conflicted entries in Sabitha's journal were also the ones that he couldn't read. But he read enough to understand the choice that she made, and regardless of whether it was motivated by fear or actual belief in the possibility of something good coming out of her choice, she made it.
"What would you have me do?" Sabby bites, and she closes on him for the space of two steps. "Tell me. /Please/. What is the better choice?"
"Get /out/. Turn them in. Step away. Anything else." Chris straightens, towering again; the fierce angles of his face are forbidding and set. "You didn't think for a /minute/ you were doing the right thing."
...and that would be one of the things that pushes Chris's buttons. He can forgive a lot -- really! -- but the willful decision to go with the easy way, or what he perceives as the easy way, following power and fear rather than one's own better angels: that's really unforgivable. It's the priest in him, and not the nice one that offers confession and absolution and all that jazz that Magneto knows, but the other one, all vengeancey and pissy. This is part of why he can tolerate Magneto, even knowing that the man is a murderer and a terrorist; the man knows what he's doing is not, shall we say, morally ideal, but he believes in the rightness of his intent, and he follows his conscience. It's not as incompatible with Chris's as Chris would like to think, unfortunately; Rossi has done his own time on the shady side in order to serve the greater good: a little perjury, a little over-the-line brutality, deals that shouldn't have been made, blind eyes that shouldn't have been turned. At the end of the day, the good outweighs the bad, and so he'll live with the moral ambiguity and his guilt.
The problem is that there's nothing of this in Sabby's journal. All he reads is her talking herself into things and the doubt and disgust for her own life -- and yet she keeps living it, because she's afraid to do something different. Again, fear is understandable. He can sympathize with fear! But when she turned Chris over to Emma -- heck, when she HIJACKED A PLANE, she crossed that line between the acceptable fear and the unacceptable cowardice.
"How? Tell me how to get out, Chris. Tell me. Please." Anger returns, heated and furious and bright as Sabby closes another step. "You have /no/ fucking /idea/ what you're talking about."
Heat flares again, subsided for a passing moment only to be fanned to life by Sabby's fire. "Yeah? How hard is it? Tell me, Melcross. What's stopping you from knocking on Frost's door and saying, hey. I want out. Erase me like you did Rossi and let me go. You ever even ask?"
Chris asks inconvenient questions!
Meanwhile, he doesn't really help Sabby much here, does he? But gosh, think about it. If it's acceptable for him to have his memories altered, what makes it unacceptable for Sabby to have hers? What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, right? Right?
...holy crap, I wrote a lot. Apparently I have to break this post up into two. Dammit.
Continued in Part 2.