Re: quicklog: atticus/matt
[Matt wasn't a tall man, but he wasn't built much lighter than Atticus was. He was so broad in the shoulders that they seemed a bit out of proportion with the rest of him, built up thick from years of hard conditioning for the best ratio of muscle mass to speed. His shoulders had to be heavy with muscle to support the weight that dragged down his left side. Even so, there was no question that an unenhanced human would have broken under the weight of the arm a long time before. Right now he was at attention, so the slope was less clearly defined.
As for Atticus, no, he didn't look like he was wasting away, and the joke earned him a small eye roll.] Just answer the damn question. [He was getting better at this - at speech, and rolling, continuous sentences, and about injecting them with a wryness that was older than Atticus was. Where before he had to break into Russian to put more than a few words together, those episodes were becoming fewer and farther between.
Atticus had a smirk worth looking at, he thought, and he didn't know where it was coming from, that feeling. Maybe it was a reaction to wasted time, or just to enough time passing. He'd think about it later, when he wasn't so much in it, when there was time to wonder why this was the second that a switch got flipped in his head from cool appreciation to impulse.
He actually was going to interrupt when Atticus said only assholes changed things, but not quite in the way he anticipated. He sat back and listened instead, listened to Atticus drunkenly swing his way through more words than he'd ever heard him say at a stretch. They didn't know each other well, but he thought it was out of the ordinary. He thought Atticus was very isolated on this bed on the second floor, with his cigarette, his words, and his whiskey bottle. Even his vision of Steve was of a lone gun.] He was. [Matt looked at the bedspread.] A good man in a harsh world. Had friends, though. Were a lot of good men who were tools for the military. Steve, he got the extra special treatment, but that doesn't make the rest of them any different. Some of them were assholes, but not every one. [He paused, and he smiled, sidelong.] Most of them, sure.
[Atticus had words for every eventuality. Matt might not have read the book in his hands, but he thought that the passages Atticus chose said more about him than they did about the author.] Reading a book you've read a hundred times. [Observed without judgement, but that was what he connected with first when Atticus plucked the passage out, almost from memory.] Except in the real world, it doesn't disappear. [As far as Matt was concerned, no amount of looking forward made the past disappear completely. Not even when you couldn't remember it all.
[Brooklyn and brownstones were met with an appraising look. He'd heard the flicker of something in Atticus' voice, but not enough to pinpoint him to the Bronx. New York proper, maybe, but no further.] Nice tony parents, I bet. [A small smile, and he leaned hard into the Brooklyn, on purpose this time.] Hear brownstones ain't what they used to be. No Brooklyn you ever been to.