kore_logs | I don't feel like calming down, no I don't

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I don't feel like calming down, no I don't

Who: Charlie Luciano and Ned
What: Fine scotch is the perfect apology for accidental kidnapping, right?
When: Day 67
Where: Ned's place again (man he needs to get a guard dog all these gangsters are finding him)
Warnings: Really really terrible attempts at apologies. Also booze!

To be perfectly fair to Charlie, he had been planning on coming to see Ned himself. So all the nagging he'd got from Meyer about it was completely unnecessary. He'd been aware of Meyer paying his own visit the other day, and figured he just had to bite the bullet and go for it. With the two of them trying to set up their game in town, it would be damn stupid to leave yourself with any potential enemies when the problem could be cleared up with a little dialogue.

Not that dialogue was Charlie's forte. Which is why he brought a peace offering.

He'd found the bottle of scotch under the floorboards in the closet of his room. And yes, he'd looked under the floorboards. It had been a very long week stuck indoors and it had made him feel marginally better to at least pretend he was hunting for treasure.

Which is why Charlie is holding a bottle of rather nice scotch with him as he rings the doorbell. He's dressed down from his usual suit, as they finally decided to make an attempt to blend in a little more. And the knees of his suit pants were wearing through. He's in jeans and a modern-looking jacket, with his hair curly and sticking up everywhere without the usual pomade.

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Ned catches that nasty look and looks away quickly, down at the glasses, swallowing against the surge of adrenaline it brings on. Charlie isn't going to hurt him, he reassures himself. He just doesn't want to talk about it, and Ned should have respected that. At least, he's almost positive that Charlie isn't going to hurt him. That is just his mind playing tricks, seeing danger where there isn't any, and he's tired of it. Tired of being afraid. Tired of everything being such a struggle.

He'd thought that if he just knew, concretely, what had been happening, it would be easier to set it aside, to forget about it. Apparently, that's not true.

So he nods, even though he doesn't know, doesn't understand. Screw trying to sort it out, Ned decides. He's going to skip that step and move on to the trying to pretend it never happened portion of things. "None taken." He gets up, tells himself that he's only being hospitable, that his next question is by no means an excuse to put a little distance between himself and Charlie just for a few seconds. "Are you hungry? There's pie in the fridge..." After all, he'd offended Charlie by asking that last question, and what offense is there that pie can't fix. He'd given Meyer pie, when he'd come to apologize. It was only fair.

He's already drinking the guy's whiskey, he feels bad eating his pie as well seeing as he was the one coming to apologise. Well. Not guilty enough to turn down pie.

"What kinda pie is it?" which is clearly the most important question.

"We've got apple and we've got kiwi-lime."

In the kitchen he can breathe easier, can take a moment outside the line of Charlie's sight to bring a hand to his neck, unconsciously, to rub away the memory of heat and constriction and pain. He wills his knees to stop shaking. The whisky is going to his head already, making him feel light and ever so slightly skeptical of the floor's ability to stay in the same place beneath his feet.

He follows Ned into the kitchen after a little while, just soon enough to catch the end of that hand on his neck. And while some people may give him grief about being a little slow on the uptake sometimes, it'd take a real idiot not to recognise what that was for.

"You ain't gonna pass out on me, are you?"

Charlie's words make him start, but are oddly reassuring; Charlie isn't angry. Seems, in fact, concerned about him, in his own, apparently sarcastic manner. Ned lets out a small but genuine laugh at his own jumpiness (and really, he thinks, Charlie can't blame him for being jumpy, after everything that happened), opening the fridge and getting out both pies.

"Don't think so."

He gets down two plates, cuts out two small slices of both pies, sets one of each kind on a plate. This way Charlie doesn't have to choose between the two, and doesn't have to feel awkward about sitting there eating pie while Ned has nothing.

"So Meyer said you two run a card game?" He hands one of the plates, and a fork to Charlie. The conversational cue is, he hopes, clear: he isn't going to be asking about that night or bringing it up anymore. Better to leave the past in the past and start afresh, as far as he can manage it.

Charlie pulls the green one towards him because it looks interesting and he knows for a fact he likes pretty much anything. He takes a bite and his eyes go wide with shock. Damn, he hasn't tasted food, real food since they showed up here. It's been rice and canned beans for days and damn if that one bite of pie doesn't blow it all out of the water.

"Fuck this is good, huh." He chases it with a sip of whiskey he brought in with him and then takes another bite.

"Yeah, been doing that for a few years. We're thinking of moving onto into bigger stuff, you know? But the card game was a good place to start when neither of us was exactly rolling in it."

Edited 2013-05-04 16:36 (UTC)

Okay, Charlie, you like his pie, you can stay. The corner of Ned's mouth quirks up into a smile at the foul-mouthed but clearly heart-felt compliment. He waits for Charlie to be done chewing and then walks with him back to the couch and the bottle. It's a bit more of a relief than he'd like to admit to be sitting down again.

"What kinds of bigger stuff?" Ned asks, politely. Meyer hadn't mentioned any future business plans to him, but then, perhaps it had seemed too depressing to him. That whatever he'd been hoping for was interrupted by this unasked for stay by the sea.

Ned meanwhile has another sip of his whiskey, eats a small bite of his slice of apple. It's nice, being able to eat his own pies for once, without the fruit rotting inside. He spends so much time making pies for other people that he forgets, sometimes, to make it for himself.

"Y'know. Just stuff. Branching out." Please, sound more sketchy if you can, Charlie. He mentally kicks himself for sounding so goddamn obviously and sort of throws himself on the sofa a little too aggressively in retaliation.

Fortunately for Charlie, Ned's ability to sense shadiness is severely underdeveloped. Though he notices the vehemence with which Charlie sits back down, he thinks that's just because of the whiskey. As for his vagueness when it comes to future prospects, that's easy enough to account for: they haven't been planned yet. Perhaps, in fact, Charlie's more enthusiastic about the idea than Meyer, and that's why he didn't bring it up. He seemed, as far as Ned can tell, to be the more measured and cautious of the two. "Cool."

Ned sits down, too, though more carefully. His cheeks are already beginning to show the telltale flush. It's a little funny to him, now, how different the two of them seem to be. Conversation with Meyer had never flagged, but with Charlie, his attempts to strike up talk seem to get shot down within a second or two. Still, Ned doesn't mind trying a few more times. The whiskey is certainly helping with that level of social courage.

"Are you like Meyer then? All about the... statistics and stuff?" Because it is really just statistics and stuff, to Ned. He is competent at math, enough to get by, but it's all very basic-level knowledge.

Charlie's mood goes from surly to grinning broadly again in the space of about two seconds. It's something Ned may pick up on soon. No matter what mood he's in, it's likely to get interrupted and be something completely different in a few minutes.

"Naw, I never had much of a head for all that shit. Why do you think I keep Meyer around? I swear he gets off on numbers or something. I ever interrupt him in the middles of it he always looks like he's gonna lose it and shoot something. 'sides he just gets pissy if I try to do his jobs, you know?"

Ned is having a hard time picturing Meyer getting angry enough to seem like he was going to lose it. Generally speaking he seemed to have 'it' pretty well under control. Then, Ned thinks back a bit further - not to their friendly conversation, but to the way he'd thrown himself between Charlie and River and told the two of them on no uncertain terms that they were going to stop fighting that instant or so help him.

And, well, if Ned's a little surprised by the "and shoot something," it can be written off as a difference of the times. Charlie's not saying that Meyer would actually shoot things, let alone people. It's just part and parcel of the entertaining way that Charlie has of speaking.

"I'm like that when I'm baking," Ned says, with a nod. "Not my fault that other people get things wrong. It's easier if I can just do my thing without anyone interfering."

He tops off Charlie's glass, and it is taking considerably more effort, now, to pour neatly. When the conversation turned to Meyer, it didn't instantly fizzle and die, so Ned continues on the same subject. "So how'd you two meet?"

Yeah, it really is a topic of conversation Charlie will happily ramble on about. It is a good story about how they met, although he is going to edit it slightly in his favour.

"We was both kids, on the Lower East Side, you know? I was... fourteen? Maybe? Meyer was the scrawniest fucking kid you'd ever seen in your life. There was this group of guys, Degos who thought they owned the block. They was hassling him for a nickle, and even though he was outnumber and about nine years old he tried to take them on, the idiot. And when you see a thing like that you wanna find that kid again and tell him he got nerve."

Neatly leaving out the fact that Charlie was IN the gang in question, and had given up trying to get any money off him the minute the little fucker started biting.

Well, that was a fair bit more horrifying than Ned was anticipating, even without the details that Charlie leaves out. Of course, he'd run into his fair share of bullies in his time at boarding school, but this sounds distinctly more violent, more awful. Perhaps it's partially because, apart from the exact moment when he'd been attacking Ned, Meyer had been so agreeable, so pleasant to be around. And it really doesn't strike him as fair, particularly if he'd been so much smaller than the others.

There's a crease between his brows, and he clearly doesn't find this story as charming as Charlie seems to. "What's a Dego?" He's not familiar with the term. He takes another sip of his whiskey, thinking that, actually, the taste isn't so bad, in between bites of tart-sweet pie.

Oh Ned. Growing up in their neighbourhood you were lucky to make it to the street corner with your pocket money still in your hands.

"Italians, you know? Sometimes they hassled the Jewish kids in the neighbourhood."

Oh good, racial tension.

"Oh!" Ned bites the inside of his bottom lip, feeling embarrassed for having asked. He's starting to get a picture of the way that Charlie and Meyer grew up, and it hardly seems to be a rosy one. Interesting, that Charlie is so frank about it. Somehow he can't exactly imagine Meyer being the same. He'd probably redirect the conversation to something less personal, Ned thinks.

Then he feels bad for his continued curiosity. He wants to ask more, know more, but is that exactly fair to Meyer? He wouldn't want someone asking all about his childhood, while he wasn't there to supervise or correct things or steer the conversation away from touchy matters. So, out of respect, he diverts the topic of conversation, slightly, towards Charlie alone.

"You're Italian though, aren't you? If you don't mind my asking?" The accent kind of gave it away, to be honest.

It's not exactly subtle, no.

Charlie himself is completely blase about talking about Meyer's childhood without Meyer approving it. Hey, it was his childhood, too. And Meyer can suck it if he minds.

"Yeah. Lived in Bumfuck Nowhere, Sicily when I were a kid."

"Always wanted to go to Italy, someday. Never been outta the country." He'd never had the time, never had the money, never had the courage. "Unless you count here."

Which it is clear from the disdain in Ned's voice that he certainly doesn't. Gradually, though he isn't aware of it, Ned is beginning to slip into a (for him) unusually irritable temperament. It doesn't help that, from his position on the couch, he can see the camera pointed at the room, coldly observing them. Jesse had had the right idea earlier in the day when he'd thrown a shirt over it. Had he moved it, or had one of the scientists slipped in to do so? The idea of the latter makes Ned's skin crawl. He's slipped into the habit of thinking of this place as a kind of home, but it's not. It's a cage.

"Might not get the chance, now. If we don't find a way out, or they don't let us out. Won't see St. Peter's or anywhere at all."

Edited 2013-05-06 20:00 (UTC)

"Got no idea what it's like in the future or whatever it is, but if it hasn't changed since I were there I wouldn't bother. Full of people who think they're better than everyone, you know? In New York you do whatever you want, nobody gives you crap about it."

He may have higher tolerance, but the drink is started to hit Charlie now, too. Which means he's now talking a lot faster and bouncing very slightly in his seat. He's nothing if not an animated drunk. But even caught up in his own storytelling he notices where Ned's eyes are going to, and follows them himself.

"We tried an take care of one of them cameras first day here, and the next day it'd stuck itself back together or some shit. Gives me the real fucking creeps."

Ned tries to remember if Italy was fascist by the 20s, or whenever it would have been that Charlie still lived there. He really would have paid more attention in his world history class, if he'd known he was going to end up socializing with men from almost a century ago. "I don't know much about it. Not really good at keeping up with world news."

Now that the drink is doing its bit, Charlie's increased agitation doesn't frighten Ned, the way it might have a few minutes earlier. Charlie is, it's becoming clear to Ned, a very mercurial sort, but there's something refreshing in that. He, too, has intense emotional reactions that turn on a hairpin. The only difference is, he's used to hiding - or trying to hide - those shifts in himself. Charlie clearly has no interest in doing so. Ned tops up his drink.

"It didn't repair itself." Ned knows that to Charlie, a videocamera that size probably seems incomprehensible future technology capable of many things. "One of them came in and fixed it. At least that's what I heard happens. They must've done it when you were out of the house, or when you were asleep."

He drinks another few gulps of whiskey, and the burn is good. It's an physical echo of the anger, always there, just beneath the surface, at being locked away in this place.

"They would've loved a setup like this if they could get away with it, where I went to school. They had to spy on us the old-fashioned way. Very inefficient."

He was ten when he left, he doesn't really remember much about the politics, either.

"The fuck? We lock the fucking door. They got keys to all these places or some shit?" He's very close to standing up and ripping the camera right out of the wall sounds pretty great right now. Except that voice in his head that sounds like a mix of Meyer and Ar chimes in to tell him to stop being a dick, so he ind of just stands up and fumes for a little bit, and then plonks down again. He only just catches the end of what Ned was saying about his school.

"Yeah? What dids they manage?"

Ned laughs and it is half-delighted, half-disbelieving.

"Yes, Charlie. They have keys." He knows it's not fair: the other man hasn't been here as long as he has. If he were thinking a little more clearly, Ned might feel bad to be the one shattering Charlie's illusion of privacy and security. He'd felt safe, just be locking the door. Is it really his place to interfere with that? Then again, he is a grown man, and should be able to handle the truth.

"They have the technology to bring us together from across time, to change us all, overnight, into... into vampires and monsters and whatever the hell you and I turned into. I'm pretty sure they can manage to get a door open."

Ned finishes his drink, stares down into the empty glass. His head is starting to swim, now, his tongue loosening around the sorts of things he doesn't usually say aloud.

"They come into people's houses and kidnap people at night. My friend Kenzi, she was here last night, safe and sound in her bedroom upstairs. Only not safe and sound because this morning?" Ned gestures with his hand, as if to demonstrate a puff of smoke, "Gone. None of us know where they've taken her or what they're doing to her, and there's nothing any of us can do about it."

And it could happen to Charlie, Ned thinks. He could wake up one morning and find Meyer gone, no warning, no explanation.

He shrugs at Charlie's question, teeth gritted with old frustrations. "The usual stuff. Snooping and prying and eavesdropping, searching our stuff, reading our mail or boys' journals if they kept them. All for our own good, of course."

"Fuck you, man, you don't know they don't have keys." His tone is more playful than outright angry now, even if he tosses a throw cushion in Ned's direction.

But his next explanation makes the mood more serious again. He's right that Meyer is the first place Charlie's mind goes to at the thought of midnight kidnappings. He has no idea how the hell it works, if it's more fucked of magic like half the things in this place seem to run on, but if it's anything as simple as attempted abduction, he's not going to let him get taken away alone without a fight.

He pushes back to urge to announce any desire to check on Meyer right away. He can slip away to use the can and try it then. He's drunk, alright, he's allowed to be needy.

He lets that topic slide, latching onto the next one much more eagerly. It's fairly hard for him to speak as to how he would feel if Meyer went missing without getting a little obvious.

"That's fucking messed up. See, this is the shit made me leave school soon as I could."

Ned deflects the pillow with ease, watches as Charlie processes the news about the disappearances. His worry is plain. Good, Ned thinks. He ought to be worried. They all ought to be, especially since the rate of disappearances seems to be rapidly increasing. But if Charlie doesn't want to talk about that anymore for the moment, Ned isn't going to make him. It's a lot to take in. It's hard, the realization that you are completely powerless.

"I left as soon as they let me." He lounges back against the couch, looser-limbed than before, not so afraid of taking up a little space. He doesn't look at Charlie as he talks, running a hand over his face - oh, that feels strange, why does touching his own face feel strange, just because he's been drinking? "I don't... know if it was a law in the '20s, but in my time the government won't just let you live on your own if you're under eighteen, even if you want to. Could've run off, but I didn't have any money or anywhere to go, so they probably would've found me pretty fast and taken me back. I figured, why bother? So it was the Longborough School for Boys til I was a legal adult."

There's a lot of information, buried in that particular rant. That his school was more of a prison than anything else. That he hadn't had a home to go back to, or parents. That he'd had to start his life from scratch the day on his eighteenth birthday.

"Sounds like one of them fancy boarding schools, y'know?"

That is clearly the most important piece of that information for Charlie to have clarified.

"Eighteen? What the fuck do you still have to learns by then?" He takes another sip of his drink. "I left at sixteen, Meyer was even earlier. Them rich kids, I guess they get to stay ons forever but what's the fucking point if you ain't gonna be some fucking academic, you know? The rest of us gotta work for a living."

"It wasn't like that." Oh, he's far too drunk to explain it properly to Charlie right now, but the implication of that he stayed on because he was afraid to leave the academic cocoon, that it was his choice, that he was coddled, sets his teeth on edge. "I just told you I didn't have a choice. It wasn't that kind of- " he lets out a short, frustrated sigh. More whiskey. Definitely more whiskey.

Ned sits forward and pours himself another glass. He's angry enough not to be careful with his information, now. "It wasn't fancy and I wasn't a rich kid. It was like a charity thing. Catholic, y'know. They were keeping me, 'cause my dad abandoned me there, never to be seen or heard from again, alright?"

It's not exactly how he imagined it, the first time he'd tell anyone about his dad. He drains the glass he'd just poured and pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to reign in the anger. He feels like he could do anything right now. Punch Charlie in the face. Chuck his empty glass at the cameras. Just storm into the kitchen and start breaking everything he can get his hands on. There's a reason he doesn't talk about all this, doesn't let himself think about it. He probably wouldn't be, if it hadn't been for his conversation with Jesse, earlier. It was all on the surface already, just waiting for the tiniest tap to break the shell.

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