2014.02.16 - Rough Cuts - Part 1: Knives Out

He gets the message when he's in Gotham, of course. (Of course.) It reads:

Pop quiz. When worried, should I A: demand meeting B: stalk C: gossip with blondes D: ???

Of course. Because of course, she probably has all the security cams fucking trained on him. Or just running some kind of background pattern checking or something or other for his face in Old Gotham, who knows.

Wisdom's not even picking any fights, or leaving himself out as bait for any fights-- he's been walking, every day and a lot of nights. Just communing with the asphalt and cement. Eating when he has to, screening his calls, answering most of his texts with 'fuck off'.

Right now, he's not even walking, he's just smoking over the side of an overpass, ashing on speeding cars and melting the salty dirty re-frozen slush caked up on the wall-side of the pedestrian walkway.

He looks at his phone for a long moment.

Finally, the man texts back, 'fuck off'.

There's no response, not right away. That's probably not a surprise. It's probably also not a surprise that after a couple of minutes, there's another pedestrian risking the overpass. Coming from the same direction he did, either by chance or to give him the option to walk away without looking too much like that's what he's doing. Black wool coat; knitted hat in a grayed-out blue, just a little off-kilter. Hands jammed in pockets. Gotham camouflage.

Wisdom's glove's already back on after texting. Given his non-issue with the cold, the gloves are obviously for predictably Pete reasons. He's leaning on the wall again, and he glances in the direction of the approaching figure, then looks back down at the traffic.

His face is pale and thin and drawn, not even angry, well past tired and into shutdown; his shoulders are tight under the greatcoat, bunching it up a bit. He flicks the cigarette into the gutter. "Do you not understand 'fuck off', Pryde? This isn't your problem."

"Sure I understand 'fuck off.' It means 'you have no alcohol content, go away.'" Kitty Pryde's hands come out of their pockets (the gloves, in her case, match the hat, although for entirely different reasons), and she props herself on the wall a couple of feet away, weight balanced between feet and forearms. She doesn't watch his face, not from that close. The traffic is fascinating. Or possibly just more comfortable. "Big words from somebody who runs a problem adoption service for a living. If you figure even Ali's pissed off at you, things really *must* be sucking."

"I'm not," Pete says, in a tone that would be acidic if it had any energy behind it, "drinking." He pushes off the wall again, body angled like he's going to walk off, but he's just fumbling for -- and lighting -- another cigarette. "And I don't run jack shit. Ali might talk to me. I don't want to talk to her. Rain wanted to talk to me, but she listens when people tell her to fuck off." He's turned away from Kitty completely, now, back of his coat an impenetrable black wall, collar turned up. "I'm not going to do anything else I can't undo, so fuck off before you tempt me."

"I didn't say you were." Drinking, presumably, from the timing of that protest. Just as he's turning away and bringing up nicotine and fire. There's a shift behind him, the quiet crunch of a foot coming down in the icy crud that covers just about every surface in this part of Gotham to one extent or another ... and then there's possibly the sound he expected least to hear from behind him.

Nothing.

Traffic below them; occasionally traffic beside them. Maybe breathing, it's a quiet enough sound for passing cars to override most of it and the rest to be lost in the chill of the air. Snow always eats sound, anyway. Maybe not breathing. Maybe she just took him at his word and dropped straight through the overpass.

Odds of him getting *that* lucky, not high. But it's quiet.

He stands there, smoking, waiting-- or letting his mind chase itself around in miserable loops-- it's impossible to say. But he hasn't walked away yet. Wisdom's still there, gloves on, coat collar up.

Thoughts and thoughts in circles. Ideas had and tossed. And then something in his posture changes. He's already asked her 'why the hell do you care', before. He's not about to do it again, because he remembers part of the answer.

When he turns around, his eyes a burning bright blue, red-rimmed, underslept. "If you still think you owe me, go to the Defenders. Find a way to get Strange to listen to you. I made a-- I-- I killed a man who was trying to usurp her throne. Another army was on the march to the capital, allied with the man I killed. There's an asshole evil former angel of vengeance on the loose over there who's got it in for Amy. I thought-- I thought he was in the man I killed. But I don't think he was, not anymore. Or if he was, he got away. There're other things going on there I don't think anyone noticed. There's no one -- NO ONE -- on that team now who looks for the tells, who looks for the things out of place in the middle of everything going wrong. And she kicked them all out anyway. She's alone there, with her mother, and with her aunt who-- who's fucking proud of what I did, and she needs backup, but she kicked us out and she's in charge. But if I'm out of the picture she might let them back in. But if they go back in they need someone who knows what to look for. And I know you do. Because I know what your lot dealt with back home, and I know you can think sideways more than anyone else. I know what you saw stack up and happen to Sandy. Meggan's there. She'll vouch for you. If you still owe me-- this is what I need to fix, and I can't."

She's not looking at him, while he's facing away from her. Her head's turned to look out over the cars, watching them approach, flicker past beneath, be gone. The changing patterns of gray and white and black on the road. But when he turns, she turns her head to look at him; to look him in the eyes. And she listens long enough for him to run out of words.

There are tiny flickers of change in her expression, as she listens. The hint of a flinch at that repeated no-one. Not a flinch away from him so much as enough of a reaction to show him she understands what he's worrying about. The faint tightening under her skin when he mentions what happened to Sandy, the mask that's put on for a moment, then set aside when he goes on to Meggan. And the hint of reaction when he says he killed a man: the single blink and the momentary lowering of her eyes, just long enough to absorb the words -- and then lifting them again and going on listening.

And at the end of it all, she says: "Okay." A breath. Time enough to let *him* absorb that word, and the straightforward, matter-of-fact tone. "I can do that. I can at least try. But I need two things from you to do it right. The first one is a better briefing. The second one is a question, but I need the briefing first."

Absorbing that information -- that's as routine and as apparently unsurprising as Kitty's flickers of reaction; apparently, he's not especially surprised she agreed. But Wisdom's shoulders do, instantly, lose a bulk of tension; his guard, already relaxed from as soon as he'd turned around, drops completely.

The way she phrases her 'but', what she couches it in, manages not to set it off again; the Englishman drops his cigarette into the slush, then reaches quickly to grip the iced-over railing against the wall of the overpass. There's such a strange mixture of relief and hope and despair, visible now in his feverishly bright eyes.

Pete can't spare the time or the energy to think of saying 'thank you' or the fact that they're probably in the most miserable possible place to discuss this. So he just starts.

He starts with a brief sketch-up of Eclipso, what he knows of what happened in the first place to get Amy and Eclipso to cross paths; he gives her a brief summary of Nilaa and its houses, what specialties in magic they have that he knows of, which ones are allied with Amethyst, which are neutral, and which are opposed. He tells her about how they'd been hunting down the things necessary to kill Eclipso, how they'd been led by the nose, how the bastard got back to Nilaa.

And then how Amethyst brought them there to get the crazy evil angel. But there was a party downstairs. Turns out it was a neutral housemeet, which the opposing houses weren't attending, and how she sent the Defenders out to mingle, to see what they could find out anything about what Eclipso might be hiding in, where he might be, about how she expressed 'opal bad, amethyst good' for the benefit of those who might've lost track of all the houses.

And then how Sardonyx showed up to announce Dark Opal, who was making a bid for power, involving threats and civilians and crazy magic, and Pete was sent to check on the others -- and that then Opal demanded fealty from all the houses present.

So Pete used his time checking on the others to get them to get the noncombatants out of the room and make a whole lot of distractions, and got himself in position, and then Booster challenged the evil wizard-- and as the evil wizard started to move to attack Booster, the Defenders' distractions went off and he killed Dark Opal in the middle of a flashbang fest.

But how part of the distractions were light constructs of members of the houses supporting Opal, denouncing him.

And how afterwards, Lord Sardonyx acted as though he'd been under mental control, and Houses Sardonyx and Sapphire blamed each other for betraying Opal and began fighting. And the houses loyal to Amethyst subdued or killed them, depending.

And how Opal's bastard son's army was marching on them when Amy said she'd made a mistake bringing them here, and made them all leave.

Finally, Wisdom waves his black-gloved fingers in the frigid air, looking away; dropping his hand to the rail again, he makes sure it doesn't look like it's shaking. "What's... I mean. I'll elucidate on any of that. I'll try to-- to get all of the details, write them down. But what's the question?"

It *is* probably the most miserable place possible to be doing this. Kitty doesn't protest that, though. He's not making noises about going inside or sitting down -- she's not about to interrupt him. Not even to ask questions, though when he starts into his summary of the houses of Nilaa, she pulls a phone out of a pocket with one hand and her glove off her other hand with her teeth, and divides her attention briefly between soaking up information and thumbing in notes. (It's her phone. It's probably got better security than most governments can put on a server -- even if they start by completely disconnecting it from the Internet.)

Her hand only covers her face once before she pulls the glove back on.

"Don't worry about that too much," she says finally to his offer to get all the details. "You got enough for me not to have to worry too much about being brought up to speed. If there's anything else that matters, I can get it on the fly if I have to." If she can get involved at all. "But, yeah. Question." And it might occur to him now that she never said 'answer'. Bluntly: "Aside from Amethyst going 'okay, everybody out of the pool.' Did they kick you out? Or did you kick you out?"

"They--" starts Pete, briefly flummoxed, having to jam himself in to the right context sideways in a hurry.

His hand moves to an unremarkable stretch of his belt to one side and he freezes, and he drops his hands and curls them into fists and jams them in his pockets. "She cut me off. I am unclear as to the status of my oath to her, but I'm certainly fired."

His lips are thin; he looks away again. "Even-- even Strange was offering for some of the team to stay and help, at least. I didn't tell them what I was setting up in a hurry. They found out they were accessories after the fact. Because they trusted me. Maybe I'm not-- kicked out, but-- it's her home, Kitty. Nilaa is her home. And her kingdom. And in that place, she's my liege; I'm loyal to her and her House. And it sure as fuck looks to her like I started a war there."

"So you figured you were doing them a favor?" Kitty half-prompts, half-asks. "By skipping the awkward part and getting out of where they'd have to look at you, before they actually had to talk to you about it?"

"No, I've-- been trying. To figure out-- what the *fuck* I can do, Pryde. I've been trying to figure out how the fuck I can tell them they're not paranoid enough when I just shot any credibility I had about caution in the stomach. I've been trying to-- she won't let me back there. She'll never let me back there. Even if I didn't break my oath, I fucking shattered her with what I did. She doesn't want *anyone's* help because of what I did. She doesn't--"

He's still lying to himself. He trails off because even if everything Pete Wisdom just said is true, it doesn't answer Kitty's question, and he knows it. And he's angry as fuck that she's right. And he's even angrier she's calling him on it, and that she's right to call him on it. That she's bringing attention to it.

And there's no excuse for him, but there are always reasons. "I couldn't FUCKing look at THEM. At their faces. At Meggan-- or Carter-- at Strange-- because--" From biting off words to almost a yell, eyes blazing bright in the night, "I can't even tell if I was RIGHT anymore."

And twin sparks in hers, reflections of his fire. "That's a start," she says, quiet. "Because if you're not dead-kneejerk-sure anymore, and you can finally admit it enough to say it out loud -- you can start sorting out what got fucked up where. And that's your real job right now. This other stuff that I'm picking up -- it's important, yeah, but that's just the stuff that has to get done, that was getting in the way. Now you get to start dealing with the hard part."

A breath.

"I don't know your team. Maybe heading out really was exactly the right thing to do right then." -- her voice doesn't pick up any volume, then. It just changes from steady and matter-of-fact to something that can slice the air like his knives. "But fair warning right now, mister -- if you ever run out like that on a team I'm part of? I am going to track you down and kick your fucking ass so hard you will be smoking your fucking cancer sticks with your colon. Are we clear?"

"I stopped being fucking sure the second I knew she actually cut me off," says Pete, and god-- god, he sounds angry, but it's it's like he's really only phoning it in. Because there's something a lot stronger behind it, and the anger's to cover that up, and there's almost no energy left for it. He doesn't even bite the words.

He turns his shoulder to Kitty's cutting voice, cutting words, and jerks his cigarettes out of his pocket and lights another one up. Mistake. Light, hand unsteady. He turns away further, blows out a cloud of smoke. He's not looking at her. He won't. "For the fucking record. If I'd run that far I wouldn't be carrying my fucking phone to tell people to fuck off with, would I. You talk to them. Meggan'll love to see you. I'll text when I get anything."

"I know," she says from behind him. "To both. Don't, like, elbow me in the gut or anything." The hug from behind him is otherwise unannounced, brief and hard and one-armed. On the side minus cigarette. "Don't get hit by a bus, either. Jackass." She's already letting go as she's speaking, but she doesn't start turning around till after she's done.

Pete does not elbow Kitty in the gut. He makes a quiet hwuff sound as squish impacts and contracts, doesn't seem to take further offense-- or get any more offensive than he's been; he also doesn't particularly react otherwise, but given the brevity, it's likely what Kitty was expecting.

Possibly surprising is that he says anything else at all, as he starts off without looking at her, shoulders hunched. It's a grudging, "Won't."

Probably just as she's turned around to walk off the other way, he slows a little, turns his head a little, says a little louder, "You're a brick." And that's the closest he's going to get to being civil for probably at least another day; he stalks off to make up for it.