Stephen Dedalus has Lost his Wings (stephendedalus) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2014-01-12 21:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, peggy carter (mcu), stephen dedalus |
Who: Peggy Carter & Stephen Dedalus
When: Sunday.
Where: Potts Tower, Stephen's new digs. Grantaire's old trousers.
What: An unstoppable force is met by an immovable object: or worse and better at the same time.
Rating:PG-13. Finished.
All they'd said was that he'd been here before. That there were things that had belonged to him and Victor Hugo's drunken sceptic tucked away in storage together and we was welcome to the lot. As though that explained what was happening here, why the lights were so bright or why his head was pounding. No that wasn't quite right. His head was pounding because Private Carr had punched him in it, which was not something he'd deserves in the slightest. He didn't think it was a very Catholic thing for any man to do to punch a person for insulting a priest, after all, there was all that business about turning the other cheek and whatnot and wherefore. But it was a glad thing that he had belongs, as the pants he was standing in were wet with a few slashes of urine from the rainwater and piss puddles he'd fallen in. His eye was swelling, and his head was sopping in drink and dystopia. He'd like a sleep, and since he wasn't about to head back to Buck and the tower. This would do. The future. The New York. Whatever it was. He was in his new room now and he could take his bloody mourning trouser off. May she rest in peace. Two very succinct knocks upon the door announced Margaret Carter’s presence. Two very self-contained knocks, from a self-contained woman whose knuckles were girded with brass and whose heart was swathed with the righteousness of her very real anger. It had been troubling, thinking that Stephen Dedalus again toiled beneath the same roof and moreover it had been reason to keep away. But she didn’t know how to keep away. And so she thought to greet him with a good, hard punch before sending him on his way. So she knocked again. And again. And again. Then, with a rattle, she tried the door. "Now just a minute." Dedalus called to his unseen guest who lingered knock, knock, knocking on his chamber door. With fly undone, finger in the belt loop of the fresh (Read: at least dry) denim he'd located. The length of the damned things said to him at once that they were far longer than his legs and that French revolutionaries were far taller than he imagined. He shuffled as he struggled to get his feet out the other ends of the trouser tunnels and opened the door at last with all the grace of a thick, drowsy house fly hitting a window. His dark eyes settled on the woman in front of him and he wished he'd done up his trousers. Goddamn men and their goddamn minutes. God. Damn. Waiting; waiting; goddamn waiting. She hadn’t any desire to play the Penelope to any man. Not even when the door swung open, did she intend to let herself be moved. But of course she hadn’t imagined his presence would gutpunch her as hard as it managed to do. Was this the way of ink and vellum? He hadn’t changed much, with his trousers all down-gyved and his hair a wrack and ruin. And it took a very real amount of self-control to suck in a breath. “Welcome to New York.” Her fingers tightened around the brass in her fist. “Stephen Dedalus.” "Is that where I am?" His words were slowed with his lazy, Dublin-laced accent, like he dragged each syllable through mud before he was through with it. Because language smelled just as much of piss and gutters as he did, because Ireland was the land of language, as words were all the damned English had left them able to afford: free. Speech was free too, less you said something another man didn't like. Then the cost was a black eye if you were lucky or a tooth if you weren't. "Welcome to the room they've given me in a tower in New York. Ah-- you." Margaret he thought but didn't say. She looked like one, was all, with the way she was. However she was. Margaret she was. "You." “Me?” she asked, her fist lighting briefly upon her breast before it again fell to her side.”Me.” The familiarity inherent within the swell of Dedalus’ intonation brought a narrowed-eye (a warning to the ticking beast in her breast) followed by a purse of her red lips. “Do you know me?” Dedalus knew a great many things. He knew Hamlet when he read it, rage when he saw it and beauty when he experienced it. He knew people and pints and songs and what order to hit the keys of a piano to make it all sound all right. He knew faces and names and 1798; Wolfe Tone and Wilde, the poets with blisters on their fingers and bleeding hearts. And he looked at her and for a moment -- the single space of a blink -- he wanted to say yes, that of course he knew her, that he must know her for her to be standing in his doorway with a look of earnestness (or perhaps violence) such as she was. In fact, truth be known to all who wish it, he wanted to know her, and why she was here and why she looked so... so... “No. I don’t-- I don’t think so.” “Might I recommend,” came a very contained response, pressing her teeth into her lower lip as she considered him briefly. That did it. She could feel the band snap inside her, recoiling into her ribs as her gauntleted fist drew back and uppercut into his ribs with a dull and satisfying thud. “A little research.” Tangled in too long trousers and unexpecting the strike at his ribs, Dedalus' balance gave way quickly and he landed hard on his backside with his feet slid out in front of him. His first thought, after he wheezed to regain his breath, was that he was at least glad that there were no puddles of filth in his new found apartment. The second was where and how he would find out who this woman was who'd just done him in in a moment. Who this Margaret was. |