solomon the jitterbug. (aggravates) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-30 10:15:00 |
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They made for a strange pair indeed: slouched on either ends of the sofa, long legs up on the coffee table and attention bent towards the laptop between them. Edwin’s head was tipped back, his eyes closed and content to simply listen to the show while Sol continued to shovel down fistful after fistful of popcorn. It was a ritual they’d inadvertently created in the wake of the nightmares, and it still happened occasionally; their orbits would circle back to bring these two unlikely compatriots together, united under the cinematic banner of panel shows and really, really fast cars. For all his constant energy, Solomon was all-or-nothing. He either tore his way up and down the rugby field and ripped his skin open on the turf, or he was a (mostly) motionless mass anchored to his laptop screen, passively consuming whatever latest download he’d gotten his greedy paws on. It took some truly staggering dedication to power through six seasons of LOST in a single weekend with Filipe, after all. This time, the choice was clear: Q.I. again. The boy couldn’t sit still long enough to read a textbook chapter to save his life – but wrap learning in colourful buzzers and scathing humour and esoteric trivia, well, then Solomon might very well osmose some of that knowledge. It was a lingering fondness, a small secret that he’d nursed because it didn’t quite fit the rest of his swaggering image. Just like the short-sightedness didn’t fit; the glasses normally lived in his desk drawer, leaving him squinting at the blackboard during classes, but tonight he wore the battered pair with impunity. Edwin loved QI. Everyone gave as good as they got, it wasn’t a wholly visual medium as most televisions shows tended to be, and it was, true to it’s name, Quite Interesting. Besides, Edwin found Stephen Fry to be quite compelling, though not especially physically (save for the broken nose). He mainly snickered his way through some of the jokes, eyes closed and facing the ceiling as if he were dozing off. It was nice to have someone do this for him and if he never said it to Sol it was because it felt like one of those things that didn’t need to have a fuss made over it. But he was grateful to not have to spend the few minutes facing the screen, searching for new episodes and if laughter was anything, it was better in a chorus than alone in a room. His eyes opened and he reached over to steal a handful of popcorn. “You’re just about out there. You want some more?” Edwin asked, figuring fetching snacks was about the least he could do. “Yeah, sure,” Sol said, sliding the near-empty bowl over on the cushion. He was still slumped motionless in his seat, as if someone had dumped a pile of clothing there and then wandered on to do more interesting things. “Fill her up, ‘cos I sure as hell can’t be fucked to.” They’d reached a lull, the theme music playing while the credits rolled and his hand already hovered over the keyboard to queue up the next. The episodes themselves were bite-sized, addictive, and easy to wolf down. “What you think they’ll do if they ever reach Series Z?” he asked aimlessly, a question fired off into the void. Solomon’s mouth tended to run off with perpetual commentary when the episode wasn’t on (and sometimes even when it was), but for whichever reason, he hadn’t asked questions about the sunglasses or how Edwin Seabeck didn’t so much watch television as listen to it. Sol hadn’t pried at the other boy’s defenses yet. Perhaps being institutionalised together twice bought you a certain amount of hard-won privacy. “Oh, I reckon they’ll start it over. Or maybe we’ll have invented new letters by then, granted to us by our alien overlords,” Edwin deadpanned. He put another bag of popcorn from the box into the microwave and set the timer, turning his back on the illuminated door panel. “Of course, by that point I’m sure it’ll be hosted by someone insufferable. Like Jimmy Carr.” He dumped the still-hard kernels into the bin while it cooked. “What’s next?” he asked. Solomon snorted ungraciously. Jimmy Carr indeed. “Got time for another? I mean, not like we got much to–” The aimless drawl was cut short, his hand lightly touching his upper lip even as the microwave dinged. Sol spat a curse, his fingers coming away dark and wet – the boy immediately bent over the table, scrabbling for a paper towel to press against the steadily-spreading red. A nosebleed, thick and half-clotting. “For fuck’s sake,” he said, his voice muffled but droll, sounding unsurprised – more irritated and bored than shocked. Sol immediately stood up and started pacing, shaking familiar motion back into his limbs. He flexed his spare hand, readying it. The curse was lost to the bell on the microwave and Edwin set about unloading the still faintly popping bag into the bowl. The second curse, though, was not lost to him. He turned about and saw Sol on his feet, fingers pinching at his nose. His eyebrows knitted into his sunglasses. “Alright? Whatd’you do there?” No word of explanation: Sol simply swiveled on his heel, scanning the common room for a likely candidate (all the electronics and appliances, no go, couldn’t blast the laptop, not the TV either, the windows would end with a stupid demerit–). He could feel the energy suddenly bubbling up like a tightness in his chest, a cramping in his muscles. Too many hours sitting still. Too much time spent comatose on that couch. His bones ached and his free hand was shaking. “Soz,” he said, before a brisk flick of the wrist sent the sofa quivering, its wooden feet rattling against the floor, its entire frame thrumming and creaking before the furniture flipped as if someone had shoved it, tumbling backwards and upside-down. A resounding crash echoed through the room; the cushions scattered. It occurred to him that he’d never seen Sol’s powers before, only heard about them. This display was not what he’d had in mind for the person who liked to call himself the Human Vibrator. When the couch shot up, Edwin crouched down, closing his eyes as his pupils snapped wide and power smashed into the back of his eyelids. There was a secondary crash and, after a moment, Edwin was able to reign back on the energy and sneak a peek at what happened. “I don’t think the couch was a threat,” Edwin said as he came up from his crouch and realised that he had to brush popcorn off his shoulders and head. Solomon scrubbed at his face to wipe the blood away, head now tilted back as he gingerly touched the nose, waiting, testing. His fingers still trembled, but it had lessened. “It looked at me funny,” he said dryly, but then shot a sidelong glance at the other Englishman. Most of Sol’s exhibitions were casual, blasé, carried off with an effortless ease – an animal flexing and strutting and showing off its natural skills. This, however, had been hurried, unexpected, unplanned. “Had to do it. Caught off me fucking guard,” he stated, as if it could fill the awkward silence and the wrecked room. “The couch did?” Edwin asked, confused as he walked over and picked up one, then two cushions. He set them on the coffee table that fortunately remained untouched. Then he examined the couch, but the initial idea of turning it over and putting it to rights went out the window when he saw the very large gap in the wooden frame along the bottom. He looked up at Sol, now close enough to see the blood splayed across his skin and the drop that still clung to the top of his lip. “Gracious - I’ll get you a napkin.” That was certainly a lot more helpful than doing nothing and acting like a gobsmacked fool. “‘Gracious’?” the other boy echoed, now with a laugh wrenched out of his throat. It was genuine amusement, however: he was entertained, unfazed by the blood and the sudden explosion that had changed the tenor of this mellow get-together. “You’re so unbelievably fuckin’ British, Edwin,” Solomon said, more than aware of the tongue-in-cheek irony even as he said it. One of these two fit the prim, pale, polite, and tea-drinking image most people conjured up whenever they thought of the English. Solomon Tyler was not It. “It’s just the powers,” he finally explained, reluctantly, after a pause. He was supposed to own them. Not vice versa. “Attention hogs, all. They get real peak when they’ve not been used for a while and when I haven’t been moving enough, like.” He rolled his eyes at Solomon’s commentary as he ripped off a piece of paper towel, but didn’t respond. “Oh. I hadn’t realised.” Edwin handed him the napkin sheepishly. His eyebrows had once again disappeared behind the rim of his spectacles as he pondered that one out. “So... it starts shaking your brain into slush if you don’t use them?” “Mm.” It was a noncommittal noise, but its meaning was clear enough. “Exactly. Like an unbalanced dryer or summat. Gets out of sync. Fucks up. The sofa’s a mess but I’d be an even bigger mess if I let it shake me apart, get me?” Solomon accepted the napkin, trading it out with the now thrice-folded, crumpled paper towel. Perching on the arm of the toppled sofa, he examined the crimson remains of the towel with almost clinical disinterest. “I like using ‘em so normally this doesn’t happen. Just got distracted by...” He waved at the laptop. “Huh.” Powers that needed to be used. He could certainly empathise with that, though it’d never given him a nosebleed. Probably because all the energy in his head would cauterise whatever blood vessels threatened to explode. “What’s your timetable?” Edwin asked, presuming that like himself, Solomon had one. But Sol simply stared back, his expression blank. My what? he almost asked, but the realisation sank in a moment later: methodical timetables and schedules were far beyond his expertise. He honestly hadn’t even considered keeping the time. “Uh... dunno. Just whenever I feel like it?” Edwin didn’t understand. “But. If the repercussions are nosebleeds and brain slush... you never figured how long you could go before you had to use them?” he asked, the tone of his voice obviously skeptical. “D’you count how long you go between each piss?” Solomon shot in return, his own eyebrow hooking. The boy was a scattered and ramshackle mess, his brain already a jittering pinball machine: the concept of keeping track of something was foreign, almost alien. “When it’s regular enough, I just stopped counting. Was easier to just keep using ‘em, small things throughout the day. Like, dunno, snacking all the time instead of tryin’ to go marvin. Starving, I mean. Think it must be around twenty-four hours or summat. During the break in team training, it went to shit.” “If it meant migraines and detonating the building I was in, probably,” Edwin returned, pushing his glasses up his nose. He sat on top of the stack of cushions he’d made on the table. “But I guess that makes sense. If you could bleed it throughout the day, why wouldn’t you?” His own mental picture of attempting to do such a thing was not pretty. In a way, it reminded him of the beginning, sitting on the rooftop with the blast only going so far as half the distance. It grew, gradually, and before long he was hitting the neighbour’s chimney stack and had to relocate. “Not strong enough, mate, I can’t detonate a b...” Sol lapsed into silence, the rapidly-whirling gears only clicking and absorbing the true meaning a moment too late. He was a dog chasing cars, running belatedly after the point. “Ah,” he finally said, leaning back on the sofa frame, balancing his ankle against his knee in exaggerated repose. He let those gears turn some more. “That light show. Way back when. People thought it was fireworks. Not on purpose, then, is it?” It took Edwin a moment to cotton on to Sol’s train of thought, but the incident in question came quickly once it did. The concussion at Pub Night, clearing his head outside and being carted off to see Anthony. It’d been the second time Anthony had helped him and the reason that he’d got him the ‘A’ bat-signal for his birthday. “Fireworks? Thank heavens for small favours,” he said wryly, then shrugged. He mulled the thought over in his mind a moment, folding his hands on his lap. “That was on purpose. Not on purpose meant I wouldn’t have made it outside. I don’t think I was altogether too bad off,” he added definitively, “... just with the concussion I thought it better to take precautions. It’s a lot easier to manage here with power training daily and so much space every time else.” He didn’t speak as if he tried to gloss over the problem, but there was a sense of pressure to his voice. If Sol was keen on proving the reality of his powers with strutting cockiness, Edwin was the complete opposite, preferring to be as much a theoretical Vol as possible. This thought made the other boy’s forehead crease, chewing over the new information as it trickled in. And it met with other, older information: Most of the vols in the asylum nightmare had blood on their hands, or the fear thereof. Sol had been a slight variation on the formula, his memory bogged with the shattered wreck of his mother’s corpse – that he’d had nothing to do with – and the convulsing bodies of policemen, which he did. But Edwin... “So not on purpose means it happening indoors. Ripping apart buildings from the inside. Cyclops, like. And that’s prob’ly happened before so that’s why you’re clocking such a schedule, yeah?” It was casual, the way you discuss the weather. The pent-up pressure in Edwin’s voice was only matched by the flowing ease in Solomon’s. The only way for him to discuss such things, he had found, was to be nonchalant. “I clock a schedule so I don’t get to that point. Mainly because it hurts like hell after about 60% to have that much energy in my head,” Edwin replied, lightly sidestepping the accusation. “I just can’t bleed it off throughout the day like you can.” He leaned back a bit, trying to put a more casual air to himself as he stopped knotting his hands together. “Everyone always wants to turn it into an X-Men comparison,” he snickered good-naturedly as he tapped the side of his glasses. “These aren’t ruby quartz. They’re just cheap plastic. But,” Edwin admitted after a pause, “I tend to be a bit overly-conscientious when it comes to concussions because of that. Hence the fireworks that one time.” He knew how he worked, but the revelation of Sol needing to bleed off energy made him wonder where the boy was getting his. “Do you know where the energy comes from? Your jitters, I mean?” Solomon looked bemused at this latest triviabomb about Edwin’s built-in defenses. “Is it? No blud, I always thought your glasses was made of something special. Some weird experimental material IVI had knocked up for you. Me, I...” He hadn’t thought about it much. It took a visible effort to focus, trawling back through his memory to remember the scientific jargon they’d flung at him after entrance processing: “No idea. Comes down to movement. If I run around all day, that helps too, but if I sit still then I gotta use it more. They say I agitate, that the... uh, the molecules, I make ‘em vibrate. Sort’ve like Nawal, actually. But it’s affected me head ‘cos they say I got ADHD after this came in.” Sol grinned, then. “But chicken and egg question, innit. Am I this way ‘cos of my powers, or did I get my powers ‘cos I’m this way?” Apart from the Schroedinger’s Cat Incident, this was, perhaps, as close to Philosophy as he’d ever come. “Egg comes first,” Edwin replied, deflating Sol a bit. He went into his pocket for his phone and opened up the voice-to-text function. “Couch on the 3rd floor lounge is broken - send to Work Order,” he said into the device and dropped the bit of technology into his pocket. “That’s pretty interesting, all things considered. That they work the same way.” It made him think back to the conversation with Nawal after her incident with Mo; maybe if she could low-speed it... “I can’t imagine you being very calm prior to it, though.” Solomon shrugged noncommittally. But his choice of seating – one wrecked sofa, upended – rather proved him wrong, and in a matter of degrees, he seemed to become aware of the small-scale ruin around them. “Yeah, s’pose you’re right,” he said. “Dad could probably testify I’ve always been a little shit.” A moment of self-awareness and shame (a little-known feeling) crept its way into his chest, and Sol managed to look a little abashed. “Sorry, mate. Good way to ruin a trivia session.” They sat there, then, in what passed for comfortable silence. Chicken and egg. Both boys tall and lanky, English, but coming from opposite ends of the divide, thrown into each others’ paths thanks to a storm-lashed and decaying asylum, their powers strangling them under the weight of pent-up energy. Not so unalike after all. |