Eli Pride is Elizabeth Bennet (hybristic) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-05-10 20:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | elizabeth bennet, viola |
Who: Eli and Preston
What: Conversations
Where: Bathos
When: Backdated to the night of Isobel's failed healing
Warnings: None
Isobel had been sent to sleep, and there was no hope whatsoever of Eli being able to follow suit and do the same. His bandaged side made sleep a challenge, even on the best of evenings, and having to take care of one’s blood soaked cousin did nothing to help matters. He glanced toward the wall, the one in the living room that was adjacent to Preston’s, and he knocked on it once. He felt on better footing with the other man as of late, but he still would not knock upon his door or climb through his window without permission, not as he had once. One knock, and he’d see what would come of it.
Preston had fallen asleep on the couch amid a great deal of paperwork and in the blue glow of his open laptop screen. He didn’t have time to get through all the reports from Sparke Industries during the day, too burdened down with meetings and various fires he needed to put out at unpredictable times, and despite his reluctance he was still trying to lend a hand to Cora and those like her as Rescue. The knock woke him out of some strange, formless nightmare that came from too much anxiety and stress, and he sat up sharply, knocking the laptop off the couch. It landed with a thump and Preston swore at it.
The swearing was muffled through the connecting wall, but Eli was fairly certain he heard something, and he knocked again, his strained expression melting into something of a smile as he imagined whatever Preston was swearing at. “Are you awake?” he asked, though it was disgustingly late - or early, depending on your point of view. He was fairly certain he’d woken him, so even the question made him grin.
Preston salvaged the laptop, which fortunately was still functional, and tried to get the nightmare out from behind his eyes. Something about Monarch--or maybe it was Anton. It made his spine curl and so he gave himself a little shake and pushed the laptop onto the table. The familiar voice helped. “Eli?” Preston remembered leaving Eli bandaged up, under the impression he would rest. “Are you alright?” Bleeding, no doubt. Hospital, likely. Preston looked frantically around for his keys.
Even through the wall, Eli could taste the panic in Preston’s voice. “I was merely checking if you minded company,” he said, shelving his originally intended comment about Isobel coming home drenched in blood. There would be time enough for that when Preston didn’t sound quite so terribly frazzled. “Or, rather, if you minded my imminent confiscation of your bed.”
“Oh.” Preston dropped whatever he’d just picked up, probably to move it. “Yes.” Relief. “Please come here.” He started shuffling papers out of the way, moving them in stacks, and then stood up to scrape a hand through his hair and try to pull himself together. For some reason he smelled blood and he wasn’t sure why, maybe some leftover impression from Eli. He looked around but saw nothing, so he shrugged the sensation off.
Eli was already moving by the time Preston said yes, and he didn’t bother with shoes or a coat, only changing out of his bloody shirt in favor of a clean, white undershirt. He padded into the hall, and he knocked on Preston’s front door like a visitor on a perfectly ordinary social call in pinstriped pajama pants, an unfiltered cigarette burnt down so far between his fingers that it stained the pads.
From the kitchen, where he was rattling around looking for something to dust the strain off his mind, Preston said at the door, confused, “Why are you knocking?” He put down the coffee pot and moved toward the door anyway, catching a whiff of the cigarette just as he got close. He was never going to be able to quit.
“Visitors knock,” Eli said, when Preston pulled open the door. It seemed to him that he was still observing boundaries Preston had long since left behind, but it didn’t bother him. The man on the other side of the archway had stress lines around his eyes and a tenseness in his frame, and Eli took the cigarette from between his lips and held it out to him, a quirk of brow accompanying the gesture. “There best not be cloves in that,” he said, looking past Preston toward the kitchen and the coffee he could smell from there.
Never, never quitting. Preston took the cigarette gratefully and aborted some motion toward Eli in favor of stepping back to let him in. He looked at the kitchen, wondering how bad off he looked with his day clothes wrinkled from the extended stay on the couch. He was still working some sleep out of his eyes. “I hadn’t actually got to the coffee grounds part yet,” he admitted, glancing back. His eyes dropped automatically to Eli’s injured side.
“Stale then,” Eli said of the lingering coffee smell, and he walked past Preston into the apartment with a hand on Preston’s hip as he entered. “You’re worrying,” he said of the look Preston gave to his side, and he stepped far enough into the living room to eradicate all doubts that Preston had, indeed, been sleeping on the couch. Beneath the smell of cigarettes and detergent, there was that lingering tang of blood, which Eli was starting to suspect permeated his own apartment in a way that was going to be difficult to get out.
No, Preston hadn’t opened his windows or done much cleaning since he got back. The appearance of Iron Man and idiotic request from the CEO of Monarch, Inc. had put a halt on all of Preston’s affairs that weren’t purely business. There were some slight differences, however: a jade dragon about four inches high he probably obtained on his travels, an additional framed photo of the two Prestons (Shiloh appearing, of course, upon a closer look) sitting on a high step of the Wall with the green rolling hills of Asia behind them, and the large screen tv that Preston had bought for Poe and had not been turned on since.
Preston looked up again as he pushed the door shut, running his fingers up the inside of Eli’s arm as he passed, grateful for the silent acknowledgment. “That would be because someone was shooting at you,” he said, rather peevishly. “Isobel fixed it?”
“Shooting at me?” Eli asked, because, yes, there had been a graze, but it had been caused by that blasted not-robot. “They were not shooting at me. They were shooting at that creature that is not a robot,” he said with certainty as he looked around the apartment and the changes within. The television earned a quirked brow, and he sat down on the couch that Preston had obviously vacated, thankful of the soft surface and the masculine surroundings. He reached for the photograph, examining it as he continued speaking. “Iso was quite drunk last evening, and she was quite something else entirely this evening. It will heal. Do come here.”
Preston scowled. “I’ve been over those diagnostics several times, I assure you, and they were shooting at you before--it interfered.” The pause was slight. He looked forlornly at the kitchen, where the coffee was, indeed, stale. He decided he wanted to sit down more than he wanted coffee, and Eli’s presence pushed it over the edge. He came around the end of the couch, glanced at the photo in Eli’s hands, and then collapsed next to him (on his good side). The papers had been stacked on the coffee table a safe distance away, and Preston slumped into the leather. “She can fix it in the morning then.” Confidently.
“There were no bullets fired until it crumpled the hood of the car behind me,” Eli insisted. He knew that Anton - because, yes, it was Anton, Preston would not convince him otherwise - claimed there had been a laser pointed at him, but they had not taken action, not before. He watched Preston fall heavily beside him, and he reached down for Preston’s hand, twining fingers in a way that held no delicateness. “I would rather Isobel not,” he admitted, looking over at the man beside him. He was still unwilling to burden him, so he opted for a simpler topic. “My youngest sister has arrived in Seattle,” he said. “I quite hate her.”
Preston turned his elbow so it was against Eli’s and shut his eyes, which stung from being open too long. He didn’t want to argue about the bullets right this minute, because whoever was attempting to murder Eli was probably related to EIT. Eli obviously didn’t want to tell him about it, and it sounded like he didn’t want to tell Isobel, either. “You hate your sister?” Preston asked, audibly surprised and turning his head to look at Eli’s face.
Eli made an affirmative sound, and he watched Preston shut his eyes. It was good, he thought, that the coffee had been forgotten. Closer, as Preston was now, Eli realized just how tired the other man looked. He took the cigarette from between Preston’s fingers. and he stubbed it out. “Lilly is the reason I left home,” he said, which was quite telling, but he’d been young, only fourteen and too emotional for his own good. “She is older now, as am I, and I find I do not know how to bridge a gap of anger that feels ancient.” He sighed again. “You look exhausted. What has been happening?”
“A lot of things at the office. Anton is a PR nightmare but he also inspires a great deal of intellectual confidence in R&D, so it’s give and take. We--I am--there are some problems with Monarch relations that I’m trying to resolve.” Preston sank a little deeper and leaned into Eli’s shoulder, not for support, just for contact, to feel him there, and after garnering nothing from his expression, he shut his eyes again. “Maybe you’re in too much of a hurry to solve things with your sister,” he suggested. “Time helps.”
Eli knew next to nothing about Monarch Industries. His interest in Sparke Industries was only due to his own jealousy, and not out of any desire to understand what the company did. He knew this, admitted it to himself, and it meant he had no notion of what Preston was trying to resolve. “What requires resolution?” he asked, honestly interested in the things that were troubling the man against his side. He unwound his fingers from Preston’s, and he slid an arm behind the other man’s shoulder, along the couch back. “I have had a great many years, love, to forgive a girl for her follies. Now, I find that the she left, too, after all of that. I left everything behind, and for what?” He sighed, and he reached into his pocket for another cigarette.
Preston didn’t have an answer for that last, not really. He was thinking, not sleeping, watching the white lights on the backs of his eyelids and trying to remember the boy Elijah and the impetuous nature of who he had been. “I mean time with her, not without her. She’s probably different too, and even if she’s not, you’ll find a way to let it go somehow.” Or not. Preston had not let go, and could not. He didn’t like to admit it.
Eli was very good at holding grudges, but he missed his family, and his sister was part of that. “I miss them quite terribly,” he admitted of his relatives in Musings. “My eldest sister, she was my closest friend. We shared everything, and there are moments I cannot believe I gave her up over a child’s tantrum. Children do things that should not have permanent consequences,” he said, thinking aloud, fingers brushing through Preston’s hair without Eli giving it any conscious thought. “Georgie hates me terribly at least once an afternoon, generally because I will not allow her an additional cupcake.”
Preston reflected that Eli wasn’t much different from Elijah. He didn’t say that. Instead he said, “Like you said, you were a child. Maybe this is an opportunity to resolve things. Your sister can’t go back any more than you can.” He heard the crinkle of the cellophane on the cigarettes and opened one eye. “Don’t burn us up.” Sigh. “We really should quit.” Again. He should try to quit again.
“Do you have a different suggestion for managing my stress?” he asked, lighting up the cigarette and taking a drag. He blew smoke up above their heads, and he grinned at the man beside him. “I do wish Lilly could go back,” he added, and then he sighed. “She is coming to Reliquary tomorrow evening. You should keep me from strangling her across the table.”
“Oh no you don’t,” Preston said, deciding not to give up smoking in a split second and reaching for the cigarette. “You’re on your own with that one. I would never be so cruel as to put you at a table with my family.” It would probably end in blood, Preston thought, with a kind of grim amusement. “What’s she done, this sister?”
“Ruined my life,” Eli said, handing over the cigarette with no protest and letting his head loll back against the couch. He said it dramatically, of course, and he smiled immediately after. “At least that was my unquestioned belief at the time,” he admitted. “We’d been run off to the country in shame, which was quite bothersome, you understand, and she ran off with a boy when she was thirteen. Quite the scandal, not to mention how it affected my parents.”
Preston came from a city where you could live for ten years and not speak to your neighbors, but suburbia wasn’t exactly kind, so he sort of understood. It still seemed like Eli’s parents were overreacting. “It can’t have been that bad, some teasing, maybe, but after a few weeks they’re sure to forget and forgive?” Preston sighed out smoke with reluctant satisfaction.
“No, love. My father was a criminal, someone who stole things from the homes of others, and he was banished to a very small town, where no one owned televisions or cars. It was quite rural, and we were quite the scandal,” he explained, taking the cigarette back between his fingers and stubbing it out. He stood, reaching out a hand. “We’re continuing this conversation in bed. Come along.”
What kind of place banished people to towns where there weren’t televisions? It was a foreign solution to Preston, and he had this odd mental image of Elijah living in a kind of religious colony. Preston caught Eli’s arm as he stood up, and holding the other man down, he gave him a quick kiss under the ear and then a little push. “I still have work to do. You go on.”
“No,” Eli insisted, reaching for Preston’s hand. “You’re rumpled and exhausted, and we’re going to bed. Sparke Industries will hold another few hours, and I am feeling peckish and selfish.” He was, too. Life had recently become too much about other people and their problems, and Eli was an inherently selfish soul. “You’ll oblige me, love?” he asked, impossibly blue eyes focused on the man on the couch, who obviously needed sleep far more than he, himself, did.
Preston wavered. He looked from all the papers back at Eli’s eyes, which were always effective, and then he sighed, giving in with almost tangible relief. “Alright. But I need to get up early tomorrow, then.” His palm firmed in Eli’s and he let the other man give him a hand up. He looped an arm around Eli’s waist and gave him a sleepy smile. “You’re a bad influence on me.”
“I do hope so,” Eli said, leaning against Preston’s side in an effort to keep him there, to keep him from changing his mind, rather than out of any need for support. Preston’s bedroom, when they entered it, felt familiar and masculine, and he gratefully took a step away and let himself fall back onto the mattress with only a small groan of pain at the impact. He doused the lights, before Preston even got into bed, and he spoke once the room was dark. “Isobel attempted to heal someone this evening and failed.”
Preston just got rid of anything that would poke or hurt if he rolled over, so once the belt and the collared shirt were gone, he fell into bed too, kicking under the covers. It was a good thing Eli spoke a second after his eyes closed, otherwise he would not have heard. A shifting of material and springs: “What? Who?”
Eli made a sound that indicated that he did not know, and while he held his thoughts on the matter, they were somehow obvious in that one sound. Had she killed him, this man she’d tried to heal? Did her ability kill him? Was hers a crime EIT would normally pursue? He sighed, and he rolled onto his side and draped an arm over Preston’s stomach.
“That’s why you didn’t let her fix you,” Preston said, thoughtfully, rolling onto his side into the contact to face Eli and scraping a hand over his forehead to drop it heavily on the pillow again. “Was--Were they too heavily damaged? Did she say what went wrong?”
“She merely indicated that she started to heal him, but then she could not manage it any longer. There was quite a bit of blood, and the man died,” Eli said, the last word heavy in the darkness. “I cannot help but wonder if he would have lived, had emergency services been called,” he admitted.
There was some silence, only punctuated by Preston’s quiet, steady breathing. He might have fallen asleep, trying to think through it, but then he said, quietly, “If there was that much blood, he was probably dead when she got there, he just didn’t know it yet.” It sounded grim, and Preston felt slightly sick saying it, but it was still likely true.
“We cannot be certain, Preston,” Eli said; a simple truth.
“Yes you could. You could go see how bad it was to begin with.”
“That changes nothing, Preston, and we both know it. How can we be sure the things she heals won’t fail down the line? This isn’t medicine, with schooling and testing. She has no idea how she does what she does. It’s dangerous,” Eli says, folding one arm beneath his head.
“Medicine is an uncertain science as well. Doctors do the best they can with the information they have. This is not so different. Don’t be so hard on someone only trying to help.”
Eli sighed. He knew Preston wouldn’t agree, wouldn’t understand, and so he left it alone and went quiet in the dark. A few seconds later, he tugged the other man toward him. “You sleep too little. Shall I take that up with a certain not-robot?”
Preston felt that space over the issue too, and he would have shifted away, but Eli was tugging and gratefully Preston rolled back over into his shoulder. He sighed across the pillow and shut his eyes. “I am not a child, you don’t need to call into school.” His voice drifted low and quiet as his mind slowed. “You and Shi, you’re both ridiculous about that...”
“Someone needs to ensure you don’t work yourself to death for that man,” Eli said, with the sort of resigned knowledge that said he understood why Preston did it, and that he realized it had nothing to do with Iron Man. “Are things well with Anton?” he asked, even though he knew better than to bring the other man into their bed.
Preston was too tired to analyze that particular overtone of conversation. Muffled, into the pillow, he replied, “Fine. Likes playing with that damn suit.”
Eli, personally, thought that Anton resembled a small child in the way that he required supervising, and he understood that Preston had been filling the role for so bloody long that it had long since mixed with his feelings for the other man. “Perhaps you should leave him to it, see what comes of it,” he suggested.
“No choice. Can’t argue with him about the research, he’ll do what he wants.” People were split down the middle on whether or not Anton actually needed all the supervising Preston seemed to feel was necessary. Most of the people who agreed with the latter had been around longer, though.
Eli leaned over, and he kissed Preston’s hair. He was oddly melancholy that evening, and arguing about Anton wasn’t something he wished to do in any detailed way. “In the meantime, you should work yourself less. Perhaps afternoon tea at Reliquary on workdays,” he suggested, smiling at the idea, which seemed terribly British and terribly scholarly.
Preston thought so too. He chuckled sleepily in the dark and spoke into the curve of Eli’s neck, tickling a little with the consonants. “Can’t get away that regularly. But it’s a lovely offer. I’ll find time to come by, alright? Just not while it’s such madness at the office.” He leaned closer, and in the halfway point between dreaming and waking, he reminded himself to talk to Eli about EIT and bullets. Later.
“Everyone has a lunch break,” Eli said, knowing he was already losing the man at his side to sleep, and taking advantage of that as he smiled in the darkness. “I can bring you soup,” he posited, fully meaning it. “Georgie can come along. She does love outings,” he said, quite fond of the little girl he cared for every afternoon. A kiss to Preston’s temple, and he let his eyes close. “Sweet dreams, love.”