Connor Endore ; Wolf (cursethatfalls) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-02-02 22:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | werewolf of london, wolf |
Who: Will and Connor
What: Wolves encounter one another and are suspicious/awkward!
Where: The laundry room of Bathos
When: Yesterday
Warnings: None!
Things had reached a crisis level. Will didn't want to admit it, but there it was: He had to do laundry. He'd put it off for long enough that even he was appalled at some of the clothing combinations he'd scrambled together over the past few days. There was no reason for him to wear mismatched socks the next day when all it would take was a few loads of laundry.
It didn't take long to gather everything together (including the socks that were shoved down into the cracks of the sofa, where they always ended up when he took them off while reading) and sort through it, several neat piles on his bedroom floor. From there, it was just a basket and some soap away from a trip down to the laundry room. He took the stairs, even though it was quite a trek down, because he had a little extra energy to burn off, and it would help settle him enough that he could give the proper attention to some old journal articles he'd found in the library last week.
The journey down didn't take much time at all, and he took a shallow breath as he entered the laundry room. He liked the scent, clean and warm and soft, but some days it was a little too much for his nose to handle all at once. He breathed quietly through his mouth, trying to keep from inhaling too much, and began unloading his laundry into the wash machine.
Even after seven years, Connor was still occasionally surprised by how strongly things smelled. He'd learned to tune out certain scents and pay attention to others, but something catching him by surprise - a woman wearing a cloud of perfume, an unexpected rottenness when he opened the refrigerator - made him wince the way he did when he heard a sudden loud noise. So he tried to take care of any potentially unpleasant scents before they got out of hand, and dirty clothes numbered among them.
Connor put all his things in a blue laundry bag, carrying it over his shoulder along with a bottle of detergent, marking off the floors as he went down the stairs and running over the next month in his head. He had another week and a half off before he started rehearsals for a play he was doing between films, and that would leave him with only a few productive days before the full moon. He wasn't particularly fond of scheduling his life out, but with the life he led he didn't have much of a choice. So he planned on enjoying his weeks off, as he always did that stretch in the middle of the month around the new moon, when he felt most at ease and most himself. He imagined this had to be how people with schizophrenia felt - good days and bad ones, stretches of comfort that could not be counted on to last and had to be savored, fleeting as they were.
Connor didn't expect anyone to be in the laundry room. It was usually deserted, but he pushed the door open and there was someone else inside. That was always a bit of an awkward thing. It reminded him of being in college and sharing a bathroom with five other people. Everyone had a right to the space, but it was always a touch awkward to find other people there, like it was something terribly private to be washing your hands while someone took a shower nearby. He flashed the other man, who he'd never seen before, a small smile. "Hey." He slid the laundry bag from his shoulder, pulling the drawstring open. The laundry room was a cavalcade of scents, but they were clean ones, comforting ones, and he didn't much mind them. They were so strong that he couldn't get a good sense of the other man's scent, muffled as it was under clouds of fabric softener and artificial, sea breeze scented soap. "I've never seen you before," he declared, revealing a British accent not at all softened by years of living in the states, kept strong by frequent trips back to Europe.
Will had been able to hear the footsteps only right before the door opened, drowned out by the rushing of the water into the machine, and he looked up as the other man pushed his way into the room. He smiled and returned the greeting, a quick “hello” as he continued to fight with the clothes that didn’t all want to go into the machine. “I’ve never seen you either. Though I suppose that makes sense, as I’m not down here that often, or for that long of a period of time. And I assume you’re not either, which makes the chance of us encountering each other fairly rare, even if you’ve lived here for a while...” He trailed off, blinking and studying the other man with a frank, interested expression. “Maybe you haven’t. You haven’t said. Either way, I suppose it’s not that strange that we’ve never seen each other before.”
Connor smiled a touch at Will's explanation as it spun out, covering all possibilities. "I didn't think about it that way, but I guess that's true." He opened a washer and began depositing his clothes inside. He didn't mind very much being something of a celebrity, though it was a little awkward, getting stopped on the street and in coffee shops by beaming, giddy girls. But he was actually fond of people who didn't recognize him, since it made him feel a little more normal, even though so much about his life wasn't. "I'm Connor. And you're...?"
Will tended to not pay much attention to pop culture, being more concerned with work and research, so while Connor may have seemed familiar in some way, it was more likely in Will’s mind that he was a student rather than a relatively famous actor. He smiled again as his washing machine finally clicked over into the first part of the cycle. “Oh, I’m Will. I live up on five.” He didn’t think twice about sharing the information. “It’s nice to meet you.”
"I'm on five as well," Connor said, mostly because Will had been honest about it. He poured detergent into the machine, set it, and let it run. He started loading the darks from his bag into a second washer. "Same here. Have you lived here for a while?" he asked, circling back to what they'd been discussing before. He shut the washer and started it up as well. He leaned against the door, finally managing to give Will his full attention.
“I have lived here a while, actually. Almost a year now, which reminds me that I should look into the renewal requirements on my lease. The last thing I would want to do is be homeless just because I forgot to sign something.” He turned and leaned back against his machine even as it kicked into gear more, studying Connor and trying to figure out what it was that seemed familiar about him if it wasn’t his face. A familiar sort of feeling about him, maybe.
Connor felt a vague prickling along the back of his neck and paused for a moment, wondering at it. Will seemed perfectly harmless, but he'd learned to trust his instincts on this sort of thing. Something was odd. "I've lived here for a few years. I'm in and out a bit, though, so I guess it makes sense that we've never met."
A draft whistled down the stairs from the floor above, cooling the air in the laundry room and flushing it of the cloying clouds of scent, warm, clean linen and detergent dying away briefly, and Connor could smell something...unusual. Something familiar, but not immediately so. He pulled his sweatshirt a little closer around himself, covering for the pause while the wheels turned. What was that? "Do you like living here? I've met a few people who moved out, just because they couldn't take the strangeness of it, living with only Creations."
“Oh, I don’t mind it. Though I confess that I’m not home much either. Often at work, so I don’t have much interaction with the other residents here. For as much as I know of them, they could just as easily not be Creations...” His last word dragged out a bit as the draft cut through the overwhelming laundry smell and brought a quick hint of Connor’s scent to the opposite side of the room. Even though it was closer to the New Moon than the Full, the wolf’s interest was immediate and intense in the back of his mind. Will could feel the hair at the back of his neck stand on end for a moment before he attempted to push the feeling away and carry on like nothing strange had happened. “Maybe it would be different if I had more contact with my neighbors, but I’m content for now. And at this point, I’m all settled in; it would be a hassle to move.” He could feel himself leaning forward, following the urging of the wolf, trying to catch the scent again under the fog of fabric softener and figure out just what it was.
Well, that was more than a little strange. Connor finally identified the scent, and it brought him a moment of pause and a similar desire to catch it again, make sure he wasn't mistaken. The scent was that of an animal, a wolf scent - but that didn't make any sense. Maybe there was a logical explanation for it. Maybe Will worked in a zoo, or an animal shelter, something. "What is it that you do?" he asked, pulling his concentration together again. The Wolf, weak as it was around this time of month, was restless about the scent. It wasn't normal, and it caught its interest. Had Will paused a moment as well when the draft came down the stairs? Coincidence, surely. "I travel enough that I don't think I feel it the way some people do," he said, reminding himself that he was still involved in a conversation. "So I'm with you there."
Will tried to pull in a deep breath through his nose, to catch the scent again, but all he got was laundry so strong it nearly made him cough. He hid it with a quick clearing of his throat and tried to move on. "I'm actually a Molecular Geneticist. I do research and teach over at the University. I know, it's science, which isn't very interesting to many people, but it's what I've always done. And I enjoy it." It was hard to think around the noise from the Wolf, wanting to get out, find the smell again and find out what it was, but the moon was too weak to allow it. All it ended up doing was making Will's rambling even a bit more awkward than usual. "And it keeps me at the lab quite a bit, which brings us back to the issue of having neighbors that are Creations. And how it's mainly been a non-issue for me."
Alright, well that didn't help Connor explain the wolf scent at all. He tried to forget about it, and found it difficult to do with the Wolf riled. "I'm no good at it at all," he said. "Science, I mean. I've always been sort of left brained. It is left brained, isn't it? Creative. Look at me, trying to get science cred and failing miserably."
Connor moved his clothes from the washer to the dryer. Wet linen and detergent filled the room with their scent, and he lost the wolf smell entirely. It was a relief, to be honest. He couldn't explain it, and so didn't know what to do with it, and that only made the Wolf want to know more about it. "What do you do as a geneticist?" Nice.
Will watched Connor switch his laundry and realized that his own machine had completed the wash cycle and was waiting for transfer to the dryer. He hoisted the wet, heavy fabric awkwardly, getting a noseful of damp and soap. "Right brained, actually. Left is the analytical, right is the creative. Or so the neurological scientists claim." He smiled at the self-deprecating tone of Connor's and shook his head. "Don't worry about it. I knew what you meant."
Shaking out the clothing as he transferred it so that it wouldn't clump in a damp ball in the dryer, he glanced over again, his brain still trying to figure out the mystery scent. "Oh, lots of things. I'm actually working on-- a few projects right now." He stopped himself before explaining his project to Connor. He'd kept his true research secret up to this point, and he saw no reason to change now. The Wolf agreed with a soft mental growl.
"Close enough," Connor said, smiling. "It's the thought that counts."
"Is it something secret?" Connor asked, as the dryer started up. He still had no idea how being a geneticist could explain what he'd smelled, and it was a long shot at best, but it did occur to him. "And you're...a human geneticist?" Not, say, one that focused on animals. He made the question as nonchalant as possible, while the dryer rattled along behind him.
The evasive answers didn't come as easily, but he'd had at least some practice at them in the months since he'd started at the University. "Not secret, no. Just boring to most people that aren't in the field themselves. I start to ramble about gene expression, and people's faces tend to glaze over." He paused for a breath, gauging what else to say. "And I actually work on a few different projects, most with my fellow co-workers, so our research tends to be all over the board, as it were." The questioning didn't sit well with him, and he knew that if the moon was even a few days closer to full, that he'd be in danger of the Wolf making an appearance. As it was, the hair on the back of his neck continued to stand on end.
Connor realized then that he was making Will uncomfortable, and that, more than anything, settled his suspicions in permanently. He might not be able to figure out what it was, but Will and the wolf scent hanging off him gave him a weird feeling. "Yeah, I'd be about the same. Unless we're going to talk about the sordid life story of a geneticist, I might want to play that sometime. I act," he added, almost as an afterthought. It wasn't something he usually had to elaborate on. He felt awkward, now, unsure of where to go with the conversation since Will didn't seem to want to talk about his job and he couldn't ask him directly about why it was that he smelled like a wolf. "You're a scientist. What's your take on the zombies, then?" It seemed like a safe subject to veer of into, topical and still in the news as the city began to finally look more like itself again.
“Sordid.” The laugh came out wrong, awkward and forced. "There's nothing sordid about geneticists. Really." He clung to the information about Connor, changing the subject. "Really? An actor? What sort?" He studied Connor again and wondered if maybe that was why he seemed vaguely familiar. It couldn't explain the other things though.
The question about the Reavers made Will's shoulders tense and the start of a frown crease between his eyebrows. "They weren't zombies. They were Creations that had suffered intense necrosis of the brain tissue and extremely low brain oxygen levels. For some reason it created the violence and strange actions, but they weren't zombies." He began to say more, but knew that it wasn't the sort of information that he should share, so instead he turned to check the time left on the dryer, even though turning his back to Connor made him extremely uneasy for some reason.
That was unexpected, and Connor watched him turn around. Of course, it made sense that a skilled geneticist might be brought in to figure out what was wrong with the Reavers, but that also meant it hadn’t been the safe subject he’d been hoping for. “Right. Of course, that’s uh...interesting.” He smiled a little, then turned to check the dial on the dryer again, unsure of what else to do. Situations like this one were why he was an actor - because he was good when his lines had already been written for him, but not so when he had to think of them as he went along. He felt unsettled, like the pieces of him weren’t quite fitting together, the wolf still turning and pacing internally, but he was used to the feeling by now. “Sorry.”
Will forced his shoulders to relax again and shook his head as he turned back around to face Connor. “No, I... that was... you were just asking. Not your fault. Sort of a snap reaction.” His smile was quirked and awkward and slightly apologetic. “It’s just unsettling to think of people becoming aware of Creations this way. Associating them - us - with all the chaos of the Reavers.” He sighed again and continued to ignore the annoyed presence of the Wolf in the back of his mind.
Connor tried not to follow that line to its logical conclusion, that Creations hurting people was one of the ways that humans were inevitably going to find out more about them, and that he was potentially part of that problem. He failed. “Yeah, no, it’s awful.” He ran his hands against one another in a small, nervous gesture, trying to release a little of his restless energy. “At least it’s all over, though. I hesitate to say it, but I don’t think anything much worse can happen.”
The dryer that Will had been hovering near finished it’s cycle, and he bent to check the clothes. He was caught between not wanting to seem rude, and wanting the conversation over with. When he spoke again, he was still bent over, halfway in the machine as he pulled things out. “I try not to think like that. It seems to only invite disaster.” He was still holding onto a smile when he said it though, so it didn’t come out as bleak and pessimistic as it might have.
Connor felt equally awkward, but chained to the dryer as long as it was running, and he was relieved to see that Will was done with his clothes. “Fair point,” he said, laughing a little. He’d officially run out of things to say, and unease thrummed through him.
The basket of laundry, clean and warm now, filled quickly as Will finished pulling his clothing out of the dryer. He hoisted it easily and turned back to face Connor, easily able to read the awkwardness that mirrored his own. "...So. It was nice to meet you?"
"Right," Connor said, nodding. "Absolutely. Maybe I'll see you around." He turned back to the dryer, as if willing the cycle to finish would somehow make it happen, just to have something to look at. He was going to have to keep an eye out for Will from now on.