jude. (thefixer) wrote in repose, @ 2017-04-06 20:22:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, cisco delgado, jude coleman |
cisco & jude: introductions
Who: Jude and Cisco
What: Introductions (pre-plot)
Warnings: Nada
It was circular, in a way, if you were feeling kind and - please and thank you, kindness for boy who sat beneath the trees on the spread of his own coat - and if you weren’t, it was something final. The woods had been a promise, once upon a time, a trump-card sequestered up a sleeve during a high-stakes card game. It had been a dream and then it was practical detail and at once shining beacon of small town normality. It had been fall when they had come and that was distinction. Here it was winter, thickly blanketed in cold. (Not suicidal, let’s be clear: he wore wool sweater over clean shirt and socks and there was scarf slung several times around his neck in cherry-red) Nostalgia wasn’t pleasant notion, thanks. They’d had enough, hadn’t they, of rosy-touched ideals and pretty memories dressed up for taking out and showing off. But ‘they’ was past concept and Jude sat alone beneath the trees and the house that had nobody in it at present, sat on the opposite side of the woods.
He’d liked them terribly initially. City-boy, raised with only tame parks for company and that only when parental fragility had permitted sojourn and then there had been the house of lost boys and nobody had time for parks then, did they? The woods were wild in a way that thrilled boyhoods in the Neighborhood and would have thrilled Jude’s own, if he’d had time for that as well.
He had a book spread on his knee, hard-backed and the ends of the scarf were weighting the pages to keep them open, and he had an apple in hand and the air was clean and very fresh and had no smell of anything at all. Places acquired smells from the people who belonged to them and present occupation of somebody else’s brought it home all the more. Jude smelled of soap and the borrowed habit of cigarettes (the packet was lodged in the coat pocket) that had belonged to somebody else entirely and of books and the apple’s tang and circularity of notions could be buried in somebody else’s pages and words in cold present location.
The woods were a promise to Cisco, too, though there were times they didn’t keep it. For his pack, the woods had offered shelter down through the generations, and only recently had they forsaken it, if only for a season to weather the winter away with another pack in the center of the country. It was not usual for wolves to do that, and they most certainly did not usually hobnob the way deer or other prey-animals did; but Cisco had recently come into control of the pack, and he was young to have it. Older members of the pack, though weak in their age, had the good fortune to have family in other packs, and where wolf instincts failed, sometimes human good sense took over. So they went, and took a season to grow accustomed to each other, until relations between Cisco and the alpha of the other pack had finally become strained to the point of breaking. (Human good sense was very well and all, but eventually, instincts took over.)
It was a relief to Cisco to be home again, he and his small caravan of trailers full of wolves. There weren’t that many of them, as they had never been a large pack to begin with, and at present they were all clustered at the edge of park land, on a patch that the Johansson family had owned for generations, stretching clotheslines and extending aluminium beds.
Cisco himself strode off to get the lay of the land, on two legs and not four, for now, and broke out of the trees not five feet from Jude, who so happened to be upwind. Cisco was therefore as surprised as anyone might be to find him there, and he paused to adjust his glasses (black, plastic rims, rather thick) and collect himself. “Good morning,” he said, thinking that it was probably still morning. Cisco was absurdly well-dressed for a would-be hiker: tidy multicolored sweater in bold block patterns and pressed slacks. His nod to the terrain was a pair of proper-soled tennis shoes; he looked like a loafer kind of man, otherwise.
Jude knew wolves in books. City children did not encounter animals that weren’t thoroughly domesticated and much as small Jude had longed for companion animal, familiarity with man’s best friend had only been built on the back of a series of liaisons. Wolf was a step beyond world, even if Jude had known (he did not). And he hadn’t paid attention beyond initial notice of the shining line of aluminum beyond the crop of trees, thanks.
He looked up from the book now, because hello, interruption. The man looked startled as anybody who’d broken out of the trees at speed had no right to, and Jude felt whatever the book had begun to layer over fold itself away completely in the face of somebody wholly unknown. He didn’t look like he belonged, although begging pardon, Jude looked like lost boy rather than grown adult trekking intrepidly through forest. This man looked as if he ought to be in a library or perhaps at a desk, and Jude’s smile was haphazard, and he noticed the shoes.
“Hello, sunshine. I think it counts as morning.” Jude said it agreeably, even if it was stretching by degrees into afternoon-territory. Afternoon meant evening meant the bar, and isolation had its highlights but a new person who wandered the woods in fashion alike no hiker Jude had ever seen - better, and better please and thank you. “I’m Jude, who are you?”
Cisco did indeed look suited to a desk, thick glasses and slacks, a set of bony shoulders and a narrowness of waist that made people think of secretaries and coffee house lurkers. The thick sweater did a lot to hide the natural muscle and scar set that came with his nature and his position. He surveyed Jude with some surprise through his lenses, and settled on his heels for a short, small-town chat. “Cisco Delgado,” he said. “Been out of town for a year or so, but I am hoping Repose is still there.” He smiled his easy smile.
“I don’t think I remember seeing you around before,” he continued, not in a threatening way. He circled the edge of the clearing and looked in various directions to get his bearings, scenting the lake one way and the highway in another. “But I was gone before then, in the Capital, so I guess that’s not surprising.” He looked back at Jude and down to the cover of his book, with idle curiosity.
No, Jude didn’t think so either given he had no recollection of present company appearing on the horizon previously. Not that his memory was record for the ages but the shape of the man who was decidedly unwoodsy in appearance (Jude did not have secretaries to compare notes to, thank you, but he was familiar with coffee houses and the achingly hip within them) would have registered. He looked harmless and in a landscape that was coldly empty of other people, harmless was welcome intervention if there was to be intervention at all. Jude folded a bookmark into the space between pages and let it drop carelessly to the coat spread beneath him.
“It’s there, Cisco Delgado. All present and correct, if you’re taking notes.” Cisco Delgado and Jude tasted the words instead of simply saying them, a name that belonged elsewhere and was unusual enough to strike note. Jude’s own smile was sunshine-bright even if it wasn’t quite so simple, but interruption was welcome distraction, particularly as it relied not at all upon his own sustaining it.
“I’ve not been especially Capital focused,” Jude said in agreement. At some point, and wasn’t it fair to say he hadn’t expected it, the town had become self-sustaining. Little ecosystem all its own and Jude had dug roots in deep for nourishment, instead of flitting over surface. “What were you doing there?”
For what it was worth, Cisco found that Jude, too, looked harmless. He had circled the clearing so that he himself was downwind, so he could get a scent, and he found male, book glue, clothing worn twice, solitude (in the lack of other human scents on him), and moderate poverty, since there were neither rich seasonings or over-grease in his diet. More importantly, there wasn’t a whiff of supernatural about him, except something stale Cisco hadn’t quite managed to place. Maybe the young man worked in a morgue.
Cisco smiled at the response, and Jude’s obvious pleasure in being interrupted. The solitude was probably not by design, then.
“In the beginning,” he said, sliding slim hands into his pockets as he mounted a tree root, “I was there for school.” He glanced back. “Business and finance.” He took another step around toward the edge. “And then I was working a job,” again he looked back, and added to answer a question not yet asked, “entry-level accounts receivables, at first… Until I came back here, and now I’m staying with some good friends from childhood.” Another fond smile.
“Would you like to join me for lunch? I thought I would throw something together after I found the lake, and circled back.” He paused at the edge of the clearing.
For what it was worth, Jude presented little in the way of harm even besides smelling of nothing but books and secondhand clothing (begging pardon for the lingering vampire, Jude thought of it not at all because of stretch of days, weeks, months between being bitten and not.) Entirely ordinary, if you please and the span of Cisco’s smile was measured and found wanting not at all.
The solitude was hardship, you see, given boy had been in constant company for years and the stretch of it without welcoming faces was difficult to tolerate, moderation or otherwise. He watched Cisco pick himself over the reaching stretch of very old tree unearthed and Jude did so with equanimity and utter lack of anything resembling ‘shy’. Jude was not, and he listened to chapter and verse albeit a short book and he smiled when Cisco did, to punctuate the sentence. He tossed the apple toward Cisco, loose-armed and low so it was visible it was coming and he rolled his weight over his palm and pushed upward until he was standing and picked up the coat in two fingers. Still and without the distraction of a good plot (the book was Copperfield, which Jude found engrossing, even on countless re-reading) the cool began to nip in and Jude didn’t shiver so much as he shifted his weight from one foot to the next.
“That sounds delightful and terribly neighborly, sunshine, even from an entry level accounts-receivables,” Jude slung the coat over his shoulder rather than putting it on, given it was messy with dirt and snow, “Although I’ve got no idea what dark magic those words do when put together. You can have my apple, if it can be considered contribution to lunch, such as it is.”
It took Cisco a moment to figure out that the sentence about dark magic referred to accounts receivables, and then another moment to discern the topic had changed from AR to apples. After this successive session of moments assembled into a pause, he smiled. “I’ll decline, and we can have apples next time.” He changed direction entirely to move unerringly back in the direction he had come, the blocks of color that made up his sweater picking his silhouette out of the trees clearly.
It occurred to Cisco that someone friendly who lived in town the last few months would be helpful to know, and he was hungry for a little gossip that reminded him of home. Placing his feet so he didn’t plunge his clean tennis shoes into a mud puddle, he retraced his steps, and as the walk wound through the woods five, ten minutes, he explained that he and his friends were living on his father’s property at the edge of park land.
He made a lot of noise as he approached. Not that it would sound that noisy to his companion, but all the chatter and his stepping on every dry stick in the area would make sure there weren’t any half-naked wolves wandering around camp. Eventually they broke into a clearing of trampled grass, rock boundaries to indicate trailer parking, and the tinny twang of the local country station on a radio.
Cisco waved at one or two people who “just happened” to be lounging out of doors, but he didn’t pause to introduce Jude to anyone, but made his way to his own trailer, which was a very nice model in cream and oakwood. Cisco went in first; it wasn't unlocked. It was extremely tidy, and smelled of clean sage cologne, fresh air, crushed pine needles, and very, very faintly, wet dog."Come on in, have a seat. Beer?"
Follow-the-leader so it was, and Jude fell back all obedience in the path of sweater-ed knowledge. And if friendliness was requirement, the boy who had folded book into the pocket of his coat and smiled serenity at opportunity not to sit and read it any longer - requirement was fulfilled. He watched Cisco Delgado pick a path as delicate as any cat past mess that might mar clean shoes, and half-listened to explanation of camping out. Jude imagined something vaguely of tents. Having never camped before the house in the woods (which wasn’t camping so much as it was living without roof over the head that stayed up enough to stop being cautious about it) he lacked specific knowledge of the luxury way of doing it.
Jude was not noisy by nature. City boy, accustomed to living quietly side-by-side with other people, his weight distributed over his own feet like anyone else’s. But when they reached the slight clearing, his mental assessment shifted several steps on, and accountancy even as a side-gig looked expensive. There was music, thin but decidedly unclassical in nature and Jude slid past what looked practically competent of what could be called ‘crowd’.
Not completely alone then, and certainly not out under canvas. Jude didn’t need asking twice over, he nudged shoulders into the space and stood just within to inhale. There were no obvious signs of who Cisco Delgado was other than the tidiness, which was a thing in itself, but not an interesting one. The smell of dog Jude just about picked out of the medley, but he slid into the soft embrace of a booth seat and grinned companionably in Cisco’s direction.
“Yes, thank you. This is hardly poverty under canvas. This is living the high life, sunshine.”
Cisco opened the refrigerator, white on the inside and smooth wood-label on the outside, and took out a bottle of dark Mexican beer with a glinting gold label. He palmed the cap off and put it in front of Jude, adding a spotless, curvaceous glass next to it a moment later. "I figure if I'm going to live out in the woods with this lot, it's going to be as civilized as possible." He smiled to take the sting out of the comment, which every wolf in a certain radius heard anyway.
He took a swig straight out of the bottle of his own and set about taking various packages from the freezer: dark leafed lettuce and ripe red radishes for salad; mustard, mayonnaise and vinegar for a dressing; thick white bread with a thin crispy crust that vanished into a toaster; and thinly-sliced carne asada with bright red centers from a previous night for the filling. Cisco washed his hands in the shining sink and started assembling the sandwiches, towering things with crispy wide leaves of lettuce, a splash of mayonnaise and a sharp dijon. He put a wood bowl with the salad on the pull out table, pushed out condiments in glass jars, and added tortilla chips with a fragrant side of salsa.
There was more of the man visible as cupboards opened and closed: orderly rows of matching crockery, a row of somewhat ragged cookbooks he inherited from his mother, the multi-colored spines of labeled file folders just visible in the thin window of a locked floor-length cabinet. There was a thin, professional-looking laptop folded up on the bed barely visible around one corner of the tiny hall, and an auto-coffeepot that looked like it did a lot of work on a daily basis. Cisco sat down with the sandwich plates a moment later and popped a chip in his mouth. The salsa bit back. "You live in town?"
This was considerably more civilized than Jude had expectations of, although the beer brand wasn’t stocked in the Cat. He twisted the bottle on the table to better inspect the label (all the better for filing away later) and the bottle clunked glass over wood-effect as he did so. It wasn’t that Jude didn’t drink, because he did, thanks. It was that it was rare there was suitable convergence of events that brought drinking in proximity with circumstances when he could. But Cisco didn’t put him on notice, no frisson of something alike fear ran shiver-length of spine. He poured the beer’s contents into the glass and sipped slowly, with something like enjoyment.
And of course he noticed subtle pointers from surroundings on who Cisco Delgado happened to be if you looked closely enough. Tidy-minded, by the look of it and he leaned and craned without fear of censure given occupant’s preoccupation with assembling food and caught the hideously expensive-looking device on the bed. Tidy-minded and working, and fond of creature comforts, at least so far as Jude could tell.
He smiled warm sunshine as the plate clacked down onto the table and shoved in his direction and his stomach grumbled in prompt reminder that the apple, so much as it was, wasn’t sufficient for growing boy (or full grown adult, but suffice the same thing).
“Not exactly,” Jude thought of the music-store which was hardly home, but neither was the house in the woods any longer. It had stripped itself of homely comforts, right back to beginnings. “I live around, town’s near enough to call it so. I work in town.” This was perfectly reasonable conversation to make. He wrapped hands around sandwich and dug in with obvious relish.
The beer wasn't that far out there; it wasn't like Mexico was that far away, and there were plenty of imports, not wolf drug running. Cisco was a connoisseur of a few things (paper notebooks, dry chardonnay, mechanical pencils, Excel macros, the expertly-filed 1040, mystery novels), but certainly not beer. He just liked what he liked in that area. It was a beer, not even a drink, a lunch beer. It was vaguely reminiscent of construction workers flipping metal tin cans open.
He'd forgotten forks for the salad; he slid out to go fetch them, saying lightly, "I guess that's not a long commute from the woods. I used to help out at the bakery a few months back when I was still shifting around, but it's closed now, I noticed. Where do you work?" He pushed a silver fork toward Jude and used his to stab a mouthful of lettuce.
The beer was not remarkable save for the fact Jude was unfamiliar and hazard of occupation he was familiar with a number of the local preferences. Connoisseur Jude was not, given predilection toward books, and piano music and the fine art of a con, but he leaned into what he could notice and this was one part of a whole. Not even a corner piece of the jigsaw.
“The bakery? There’s been wars over that bakery,” Jude observed with the tines of his fork promptly wedged in salad. “I work at the Mean-Eyed Cat, affectionately known as ‘that bar with all the Johnny Cash’. It’s a theme bar, of a sort. Have you been, sunshine? It’s the only place to drink in town. Or at least, it wasn’t until the roadhouse became a gym. Unless you like strip-clubs, not that I’m especially judgmental, but it’s not my fondest outing.” This was easy-paced, a slide of one thing after another along the chain of conversation.
“What do you do for fun, Cisco Delgado?”
Cisco hadn't known the bakery was a battleground. His eyebrows went up, and his smile showed that his concern was neither deep nor long-standing. "Wars? Who is doing the fighting?" He flipped his fork over and stabbed a radish, crunching down with relish, pun intended. "Iris doesn't strike me as the violent type." They had met, those months ago, and she had been quiet, though strangely unaggressive, when it came to marketing. Not that he had ever said such a thing. Cisco imagined food fights with rolls and croissants, or a particularly savory reality show. He liked cooking shows.
"The same as anyone," he said, smiling into his own banality. "Go out, have a drink. Stay in, watch the Food Network. Shop with money I don't have." He scratched at a well-trimmed beard with the handle of his fork, pondering the evolution of the roadhouse. He didn't comment on it, however. Cisco put the fork down and took up the second half of his sandwich. "Family in the area?"
It was just as well Cisco was not returning white knight, and Jude turned over the conundrum that was the small, white wraith of a baker who appeared and didn’t appear often enough that gossip made much of it. Not that Jude was precisely gossip by nature, more the accumulation of it was as like to come out when people were onto their third drink of the night. “Doesn’t she?” Jude contemplated the food in front of his nose, and fished through the foliage to find a vegetable.
“Live out under not-canvas,” Jude added to the end of Cisco’s list, and smiled with the tucked-away presence of a touch of mirth. Cisco in his shoes that didn’t belong to the woods, in a crowd of people with his expensive electronics.
“Mm, in a way.” Jude didn’t know what to call Oliver, but it wasn’t the magnetic draw that it had been for what seemed like half of the town. This was a smidge on the discomfort side but Jude’s face betrayed this not at all. “The bakery wars are between the Russian and Iris. Who wasn’t fighting back, but now she owns it, so I’m not sure if that’s declaration of war, or white flag. You’ve worked for her, do you think she would?”
And by happenstance, almost idly. “D’you like it better here?”
Cisco, the non-white knight, looked confused. "Iris? Iris bakes cinnabons." He said it like that, all one word, as if it was some kind of candy, the way his father had said it. "Violent people don't bake cinnabons." He smiled, because Cisco had a moonlit dark side, and he baked all the time. He took a massive bite out of the last half of his sandwich and chewed contemplatively. He never had got a shot at the bakery's ovens. At the time it had been like a lawn specialist wanting to play on the field with the players. "I really have no idea. But there's not a lot of room for competition in this town. It's not like we're big."
Cisco had discovered over the last few months that he belonged in a number of strange places, some of them disapparate, all joint part of himself. He could be in a trailer and still wear his fine shoes, and he could be a strong alpha while still wishing they would leave him the hell alone in a semi-permanent apartment. With a big bathtub. Cisco adored bathtubs. "Not quite that far. I stick around here."
Cisco could smell a change of subject so abrupt it was strong as bleach. He let the family question stand. Blink. "Do I like it better here versus what?"
Iris who baked cinnabons - quirk of language, that one, and Jude grinned as if he didn’t think acts of violence could go hand-in-hand with sugared sweetness. He did, point of fact, it didn’t believe there was a wide chasm between one and t’other but Cisco clearly did or wanted to. And if Jude wanted to know anything terribly much just then, it was who Cisco Delgado actually was.
“We’re not big, but that’s part of the competition.” Jude put an elbow on the little table in flagrant violation of anything like manners and leaned his weight companionably forward until he was jostled elbow against the salad bowl. “Competition in somewhere big would be distant. It’s cut-throat, if you’re small. Excellent dinner theater.”
He blinked back. Jude could look innocent if he ‘specially chose and he chose just then. It was thick lashes and slow smile. “Here versus wherever you’ve been that they don’t bake cut-throat cinna-bons?” He fitted the last word into the sentence with a quirk of a question and crammed sandwich in as an afterthought.
Maybe it was just that Iris didn't run around with a butcher knife defending her business reputation. It was ridiculous. She would lose that bakery before doing anything more than advertise in the bakery window. It astonished Cisco that people tried to do more than the basics here. There weren't enough potential customers. A few thousand people can only sustain so much economy. "I don't disagree."
Cisco demolished his sandwich and finished off his beer not long after. He wasn't dainty, and his mother had pounded plenty of manners into him, but he had a considerable appetite. No telling where he put it all, looking at him.
"We went out east for a while," Cisco replied, complacently. "Visit some friends of the family out there. Like a reunion," he added, pleased to come up with a human comparison. "We have a few families spread out in the Capital and in a couple cities that way. He smiled, and looked at Jude's empty plate. "Get enough to eat?"
Cleared and cleaned and Jude leaned on elbows and grinned companionably. “Yes, sunshine. Thanks for the invite. I’d invite you back, but I don’t think perhaps the accommodations are quite so nice.” He stood up, plates with him to let them sit in the little sink and he opened the door to the clean, cool air outside. “Come by the Cat. If you can spare a night off from the Food Network.” Sallying forth, his book not forgotten but not entirely necessary in Jude’s pocket, he swung back toward present staying-place that wasn’t canvas or woods but more temporary than Cisco’s accommodations.