Edwin Seabeck is a killer in potentia (elusive_control) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-12 21:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, edwin seabeck, nawal bechara |
WHO: Edwin Seabeck and Nawal Bechara
WHAT: Edwin helps Nawal with the worst walk of shame ever
WHEN: 12 Jan, 2013, very late
WHERE: Boys Tower, then Infirmary
WARNINGS: talk of sex
STATUS: log complete
Nawal stopped on the landing between floors, maybe between the fifth and the fourth. Of course when she would have to drag an unconscious man down the stairs, he would live on the seventh floor. Whatever else IVI had done to her, she at least knew that she was in better shape now. Months ago, she wouldn't have been able to move a person more than a floor. She sighed, looking down at Muhammad wrapped in the sheet. She knew how bad it looked, that people would talk, and somehow she dreaded the shame of this more than the shame of everything else she had done in the past. It didn't make any sense. Nawal wiped at her eye. Her vision was blurry, and she couldn't tell if it was because of water from the sprinkler, her own sweat, or maybe a tear. Edwin had probably been one of the early returners from Pub Night. He’d thought he’d be fine with it since it was supposed to have a convivial feel to it, but ultimately loss was still loss and no amount of drinking could make that any less depressing. Instead, he’d try to put his focus on the song he’d said he’d sort out for Anthony... until the fire alarm had gone off. He slipped out of the 3rd floor door onto the fire stairs, empty as it had been those first few weeks of the holiday and was immediately struck by the sound above him. Thud-shuffle-thud. Of all the things he expected to find coming down the stairs, a soaking wet Nawal dragging what looked to be a dead body down the fire stairs was not it. No words immediately came out of his now slackened jaw as he came to a halt on the staircase. He looked up and caught Nawal’s eyes. Then he looked down again at the sheet-wrapped body. “Is he dead?” he asked, and was surprised himself how calm and nonchalant that sounded. "No!" Nawal said, perhaps a bit too quickly. Edwin was one of Nawal's closest friends at IVI, but at the moment he was one of the last people she wanted to see. They talked about many things together -- life, death, reality, the meaning of the universe -- but never sex. She was a Catholic who had grown up surrounded by Muslims, and he was so British. It just didn't fit. "He's unconscious. I checked." She tugged on the sheet and wondered how possible it was to tell that Muhammad was naked underneath it. "I need to get him to the infirmary. I think he might have had a concussion." “Oh bloody hell - is it smoke inhalation? Nevermind, here --” Edwin said, waving a hand to dismiss the immediate coursing of thoughts through his head and going to where Nawal stood. “I’ll take over the front, you grab the legs.” He undid the ball of fabric she’d made with the sheet to get at Mo’s underarms, since they were the more natural location to carry him from, and paused at the fact that he was shirtless. In fact from the new vantage point up close, he couldn’t help but notice that he was. Well. Naked. “Ah.” He balled the two ends of the sheet fabric and tied them back into a knot. “Right, then.” Nawal could feel her face flushing as she lifted Mo by the legs. This was easier than dragging him on her own, but she wished she'd at least put Mo's trousers back on, or taken the condom off of him. Or was it better that she'd left that on, to prove that she was at least responsible in her poor decision-making? "Th-thanks," she stammered. "There was a lamp that flew across the room," she admitted, resolutely avoiding eye contact with Edwin. "It hit him in the head." Nawal had to admit that being hit with a flying lamp was really among the most innocuous accidents that her powers could have caused, but it did cause doubts. Harlow hadn't been able to be intimate with anyone because of her powers activating. What if Nawal had the same problem? For her, it was even dangerous. “Happens all the time,” Edwin replied with a sort of dismissive encouragement, heaving Mo up and taking the steps backwards cautiously. One could thank heaven for small favours that she hadn’t taken up with someone more solid - the rather wispy busker wasn’t too much of a chore between the two of them. “Lucky everyone is still at the wake,” he said as he found the platform and used the back of his elbow along the wall to guide him along the turn. Nawal smiled grimly. "Not everyone," she said. Suddenly, what she was doing felt even more wrong. When so many students busy being solemn and remembering dead students, she had been back at the dorm, in a room once occupied by one of those dead students no less, being selfish. "Ah -- watch out! There's the step." Edwin just kept himself from pinwheeling back onto the next flight and cautiously starting taking the steps to the ground floor. “Hopefully the most embarrassing one is still commiserating,” Edwin paused to shift Mo a bit and bunch of the fabric in his hands more. When he got to the ground floor, he opened the door with his hip and took a surreptitious look around. It took some time for Nawal to figure out who Edwin might have meant by "the most embarrassing one," but it was difficult to think with the alarms ringing in her ear. Harlow already had some idea of what she'd returned to the dorms to do, but Harlow wouldn't want Karim to know and -- "If you mean Karim, he's not eighteen yet," Nawal said, an edge of urgency rushing into her voice. "Come on, let's hurry to the infirmary before anyone stops and asks what happened. I don't even know what I would say." Sitting in the medical center, Nawal wrung her hands together as she waited for the nurse to return with news of Muhammad's condition. She felt more self-conscious than ever of her bare feet and inside-out dress, but she was too nervous to go to bathroom and fix it. At least, after walking in the dry heat from the dorm to the infirmary, she was mostly dry now. "I didn't see any flashes when we were passing everyone in front of the dorms," she said, trying to reassure herself. "You don't think people will talk much, will they?" Edwin didn’t see any flashes either, but he thought he’d scared the student population enough over the months to feel somewhat confident that they wouldn’t be stupid enough to put a camera in his direction. But he wasn’t going to lie to her either. It was awful tea that he set down, but tea was tea at the end. “What’s the worst they’re going to say?” he asked. Nawal accepted the paper cup of tea with a thankful smile. "I'm not sure I want to think about it." She fiddled with the string of the bag. She almost never had tea from a bag. She blew on the tea to cool it before taking a cautious sip. "I suppose it's not really that bad, but I just never really thought of myself as the kind of girl who sets off fire alarms in the boys' dorm at midnight." As though that were a specific kind of girl. Edwin tilted his head slightly. “Might raise you up in the esteem of some,” he acknowledged, sitting down next to her. “After all, you’re a real politician now. Sex scandal and all.” He flashed her a small, if hopeful smile. Humour was a long shot in this situation, but the reality was a little too bleak for Edwin to be quite so frank about it. It hadn’t been so bad but it could have very well have been. Nawal returned his smile with a wry one of her own. "I was wondering if the fact that he was knocked unconscious would help or hinder my VILF score." It had only been a few months, but the school seemed like an entirely different place than when their biggest concern was a few words. She winked. "It was mind-blowing." Edwin looked wounded by her pun, shaking his head and chuckling a little anyway. “At the very least it should knock you up a couple of points.” He leaned back on the couch and, after a moment, looked over at her. “Honestly? I’d always pegged you as after someone a little more clean-cut. Javier or Caleb, if he wasn’t permanently affixed to your Vice President.” "You're not wrong," Nawal admitted. She looked towards the hallway where Mo had been carried off. "Muhammad was very sweet. I can speak Arabic with him, even if his accent is difficult to understand, and he made me tea." The cup in her hands seemed suddenly much less satisfying in comparison. "But he's not my usual type, no. I've always liked the sort of boy that you can take home to your mother. For the longest time, I had a crush on Oden -- but who didn't?" Edwin couldn’t disagree with that and kind of tilted his head to indicate it. Oden was well named - tall, Nordic and phenomenally sculpted, like he was a god crafted out of marble. His year was certainly torturous when it came to well-appointed men. “They do craft them well up North.” Oden and Mimir came to mind, but so, inevitably, did Erik. Where Oden and Mimir were built like pillars, Erik was always a little more lithe. That he’d noticed so well was definitely not coming up for discussion. "If the ones here are a representative sample, then yes." Nawal nodded in agreement, also preferring not to acknowledge directly that the total of handsome Nordic men at IVI had recently dropped. It felt strange to sit here and talk about boys with Edwin, when the closest they'd ever come in the past was discussion of Max. Then again, it was hardly the strangest thing that had happened to her on this night. She sighed. "Nothing happened with him, obviously. I wasn't even intending for anything to happen with Mo." She waved her arm. "It just did." After a moment of contemplation into his own tea, he shrugged. “Good for you,” he said genuinely. “Who cares what anyone will say? Up until the lamp hit him you were obviously having a good time and he wasn’t exactly begging off. You’re adults. Sod the rest.” Edwin said it definitively, then pursed his lips. “Although.” He stopped himself, sighing a little. “Next time you’ll have to do a better job keeping your powers latched up.” It was followed by the thought that she used her hands as focus and how positively disastrous THAT might have been. He internally cringed at the thought. "I don't know if there can be a next time until I'm sure about that." Nawal sighed. She'd been lucky, this time. She had been lucky with all of her accidents for four years, but with this close call, she realized how foolish it was to put her in a position where she might lose control of her powers. "This was -- I'd never done this before. I didn't know what to expect. I didn't think there would be an issue with my powers." She looked at Edwin. He put so much effort into keeping control. He had to have a plan for sex. "How do you do it? I know you can't look at them, but is there anything else?" Edwin was so surprised by the question, for a moment he almost thought it might trigger his powers. It didn’t. “Well,” he started, feeling suddenly entirely self-conscious about it. When it came to sex and other associated activities, he was more accustomed to being very obtuse on the subject. He’d never really gotten too much hassle for being gay; he was so secretive about it while living in Essex, land of machismo, and had enough of reputation as a potential murderer that no one bothered him about it. As for Scotland, and Peter as well if he was honest, it was fine so long as he didn’t go into too much uncomfortable detail. “I’ve not had a lot of experience with it. For that reason. They trigger before I get too far in and after that... well, after that usually I stop. If they’re engaged, I can’t hold it back with just my eyes closed forever. It’s a lot of pressure -- physical pressure, not just the mental sort. And the only way to turn it off is to calm down or blow it off and... well, I imagine that would kill the mood pretty quickly.” He bit his bottom lip and thought about Hunter, who had been the only one to ever convince him to keep going. They’d both not been in keen states of mind at the time and once they’d started, it had been as if they’d run off of some hidden sense of need, fueling off each other. His whole body just shook for want of the sort of contact he’d been deprived of. But Edwin couldn’t ever take his eye completely off the ball and now that he’d finally had a sexual experience, he found himself greedy for the notion of losing complete control, to not have to split his attention and just dissolve into another person. It’d never happen. “I just can’t ever give myself completely over to it.” Nawal sighed and looked into her tepid tea. "I was afraid you'd say that." “Yeah,” Edwin replied quietly and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Of course, you do have quite a bit more control than I do on the whole,” he added, able to find that small bit of objective optimism. “And.” His mouth twisted up, his shoulders tightened as he carefully added, “and I have made it to the end once. So it’s not... impossible. Just difficult. You can’t give yourself completely over to it, but you can give some of it.” Nawal balled one of her hands into a fist. She had worked hard for that level of control, keeping her power always suppressed and her person composed. Sitting here, the mess that she was, it was easy to feel like her composure had slipped away, and with it her control. She released her fingers from the fist. Maybe she would work on it, figuring out how much of herself she could lose in another person, but Nawal doubted she would have suitors lining up to help her. She didn't before, and she wouldn't after this, VILF score be damned. Muhammad might not even want to be her friend anymore, and the thought of losing the kinship of one of the few other Arab students hurt. She closed her eyes and breathed another long sigh. Already, she was beginning to feel more like herself. "Thanks, Edwin," she said. She set down her paper cup on the coffee table, next to the outdated magazines, and reached over to pat him on the knee. "I needed to hear all that." She reflected for a moment on what Edwin had said, suddenly curious about that side of him. She didn't know anything about his romantic or sexual history, aside from his long-burning torch for Max and, now, an apparent crush on Oden. "So," she began, drawing the word out. She looked over at Edwin, with a glint of mischief in her eye. "Once. Was that here at IVI or --?" The small flash of a smile that graced his lips on her complement transformed into a wry almost-smirk as Nawal pursued the inevitable question. “A gentleman never kisses and tells,” he remarked winningly, then added, “I only hope Mo is so gallant.” Of course, the list was so incredibly narrow at IVI that she could probably guess. But Hunter had intoned secrecy and he wasn’t inclined to go against it. Nawal had only known Edwin a few months, but she could tell that he was hiding something behind his smirk and coy evasion. She giggled. "It was here! Don't deny it. I'll know if it's a lie." She paused for a moment, trying to think through the list of possibilities. It couldn't have been Karim, for several different reasons, including his age and the fact that he was Karim. Silas and Mímir were together, as were Donovan and Mason. As far as she knew, that was it, except for... "Hunter?" she asked tentatively. “I will neither confirm nor deny any such thing occurred here with anyone,” Edwin replied loftily, trying not to either blush or stammer and succeeding only in the latter, before adding with careful direction, “particularly since secrecy was impressed upon me. And I am not one to break the confidence of a friend.” But Edwin didn’t need a mirror to know that his blush had probably given it away. Nawal’s own smirk of triumph was evidence enough. Still. He couldn’t be cross. If there was anyone he could count on not to spread that particular gossip, it was the woman before him. “So,” he said, trying not to smile at her smile, “there’s that.” That, of course, meant that it had happened, but Nawal knew not to press, in spite of her curiosity. Was it just the once? Had it been before or after their experience with George Cooper? Were they really just friends? Why secrecy? She quashed the questions before they reached her tongue, instead patting Edwin on the shoulder. "It's alright. You don't have to talk about it." Presently, a nurse appeared in the hallway, clipboard in hand. "Mr. Benhamou is conscious now, if you would like to see him," she said. Nawal turned to Edwin and nodded, then stood up, smoothing out her skirt. "Thank you," she said, smiling at the nurse. "I'm glad it wasn't too serious." |