InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Have a little faith, baby."

Gabe Wilder (afterwedie) wrote in we_float,
@ 2010-06-20 18:36:00

Current music:	"The Manual" : Travie McCoy
Entry tags:	character: gabriel wilder, character: matt cavanaugh

"Now we all make mistakes..."
Who: Matt Cavanaugh and Gabriel Wilder
What: A couple postponed meetings finally result in the real thing.
When: Monday, June 21, 8 pm (forward-dated, takes place after a yet-to-be-posted rp)
Where: Beth's Cafe, Seattle
Status: Open; in progress

What Gabe liked the most about Beth's was that it was one of the few places in the city that had gleefully embraced the lifting of the smoking ban. Most Seattle restaurants still clung to the idea that smoke tainted food or disdained the small pockets of ash that seemed to float to the bottom of Beth's floors but this cafe had gone as far as to place an ashtray on every table the moment the ban was lifted.

He ashed his cigarette in the one at his table, then slowly took a drag, staring at the ember at its tip.

He should have been home by now. Gabe knew it and yet he was sitting at a table, pulling out his notebook and sketching out the faces at a distant booth. Waiting for someone to come and tell him that the impossible was possible. His mind kept running over everything that had happened over the weekend. He wondered where his other self had gone after he'd locked him out. Wherever it had been, he was gone now.

Not for the first time, Gabriel felt guilty about leaving him in the cold. Them. He shuddered, wondering, and then went back to his idle sketching as the waitress set a second cup of coffee down in front of him. He smiled at her, ordered a piece of pie and went back to the drawing.

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afterwedie
2010-06-21 05:16 am UTC (link)

"Uhhhh." It was too long a pause for the question. "Fuck, man..." Was Matt the kind of person he should mention Julie to? Gabe decided not to lead off with it. He wanted to do something productive. Whatever was going on at home wasn't, right now.

"I guess, um, I kind of, like, wanted to grill you," Gabe admitted, taking a swig of the coffee in front of him. "I'm not sure about the whole government thing but no one's like, come to hunt me down, you know?"

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palehorses
2010-06-21 05:34 am UTC (link)

"Wow, remind me to play fucking poker with you or something, man," Matt said admiringly. "I like how you totally just told me your whole dastardly fucking plan right there. Can I scream for my girlish virtue, or am I getting grilled no matter what?"

The waitress brought the coffee and pie and slapped the latter down; the former was more carefully placed on the table, and Matt noted with some glee that it was a larger cup. "Blessings on you," he said fervently to her.

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	afterwedie 2010-06-21 05:38 am UTC (link)
	"Dude, you can totally scream," he said. "I don't care." Gabe's face broke into a grin. "Fuck, it wouldn't be the first time I went to jail. Just not for that." He looked at Matt. "What would that be anyhow? Like, torture by pie or what? I once read they tortured people in some war with cookies." (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

palehorses
2010-06-21 05:44 am UTC (link)

"Torture by pie's a lot better than, like, fucking waterboarding, man. Did you ever hear about the, you know, the thing where they'd torture someone by going to his fucking house and playing music he hated at him until he surrendered? I never could decide if that was just totally fucking awesome or completely ridiculous, you know?"

He inhaled half the cup of coffee in the pause between sentences and said "I don't feel very much like screaming yet, so I guess you're allowed to go ahead. I'll scream if I need to, though."

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	afterwedie 2010-06-21 05:51 am UTC (link)
	"Nope. Never heard that." Gabe took a drink of his coffee, then said, "I guess... what is it you're doing there?" (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

palehorses
2010-06-21 06:01 am UTC (link)

"Beats the fuck out of me," Matt said frankly. "Seriously. Like, we kind of take orders from Katherine, except that she's not really giving them and just, like, laid the fucking smackdown on everyone about how she's not going to give them because she expects us all to think independently and do what needs to be done, whatever we decide that to be. And beyond that, I really don't fucking know. I've gone out to places with a couple of other people, and it's been like woefully fucking obvious that we need a coordinated game plan - hell, we probably need a field leader - and we don't have that. And I was really pissed off about the whole thing for a while there, so I wasn't going to say shit if I had a mouthful, you know? And meanwhile, I actually think that everyone else in the house is fucking twelve, you know? They all kind of act like it's one giant sleepover, or half of them do, and the other half are just monumental dicks that no one likes anyway."

He paused - for breath as much as anything - and said "It needs some organisation. I'd just about decided that, after you and I talked about why it should be done, that I could do that, I mean. I don't know if I can do it with the people who are there - going to fucking depend on whether they want to, like, fucking giggle at sleepovers or if they can kick fucking ass as needed - but I think I can at least do it."

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	afterwedie 2010-06-21 06:18 am UTC (link)
	"Okay... um..." Gabe thought for a moment, then said, "Stop thinking of them as jerks and assholes for a fucking minute, okay? Like, imagine you don't know them... and tell me about them, what they can do." He grinned quietly, then said, "If life gives you lemons, right?" (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	palehorses 2010-06-21 06:20 am UTC (link)
	"Maxxie blinks - short teleportation hops - and Zadkiel heals to some kind of limit, but I don't know if it's arbitrary or fixed. And I think Tom, like, can do something to time." He grinned again, but this time there was absolutely no humour to it at all; the expression was very dry. "In other words, I don't fucking know. Never asked, never been told." (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	afterwedie 2010-06-21 06:22 am UTC (link)
	He flipped to a blank page in his sketchbook and wrote the names down. "There were more there, I remember. Am I, like, not the only one who didn't sign on the motherfucking dotted line?" (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

palehorses
2010-06-21 06:25 am UTC (link)

"Well, there's me," Matt said, a touch of caution to his voice. "I can kill - it's sort of complicated, but the main point is, I don't and I won't. And then there's Ganesh, Del, Alec, and that guy who was, like, changing faces every ten seconds that one day. Oh, and JT, who's a nat. And Jael, that girl with the goat legs. And I think you're the only one who didn't sign on the dotted line."

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	afterwedie 2010-06-21 06:27 am UTC (link)
	"Go me," Gabe smiled. He wrote the other names down, thinking it over. "Um. That's a lot of fucking people when you think about it." And he was thinking as he lit another cigarette, sliding the pack across the table to Matt in offering. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

palehorses
2010-06-21 06:31 am UTC (link)

Matt took a cigarette and drained his coffee before he lit it. "It kind of is," he conceded, "but I kind of think that's only a - a - you know, a real fucking statement, if they - we - can all work together to achieve something. Like, we need a fucking plan, and a sense of what everyone can do, but that got real stalled real quick when someone went to Katherine about it and got kind of smacked down about her not having unlimited cash, you know? So the idea of a plan's faded, and it doesn't fucking matter how many there are, if everyone's tripping over everyone else, you know?"

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afterwedie
2010-06-21 06:38 am UTC (link)

"Cash isn't it," Gabe said calmly. "I mean, shit, cash isn't going to get much of anything other than weapons, right? And fuck, aren't we- you- supposed to be the weapons?"

He looked at the list again. "Dude, if we were cops, we'd start by knowing where we were. Walking the streets. Talking to people. Figuring out the good and the bad. You don't need money for that. Fuck, if you've got too much of it, you'll just get fucking killed."

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palehorses
2010-06-21 06:41 am UTC (link)

Matt sat back and looked at him in surprise. "Okay," he said slowly. "So ... how does that become cash other than by selling Alec for spare parts?"

The other part was a good idea - he thought back to Zadkiel saying he didn't know where he was, and his own dismissal of that because Matt did know where he was - and he wouldn't have seen the lack in a million years.

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	afterwedie 2010-06-21 06:43 am UTC (link)
	Gabe shook his head. "Dude... I just am not seeing why you need a lot of money. For what?" (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

palehorses
2010-06-21 06:47 am UTC (link)

Matt shrugged, but at the same time, he mentally laid some cards on the table. "We've got to get off the government tit," he pointed out. "Means rent, food, transportation, utilities, at the basics. No one's got a really good job - it's a bunch of unemployed and half-employed people who could be fired at any fucking minute for their genes. Same time, if we don't get away from the government, I don't see how to turn this group into what it needs to be. And if they won't come, fuck them, I'll go find the people who will do it, you know? So we need cash to stay alive."

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	afterwedie 2010-06-21 06:49 am UTC (link)
	"That makes more sense," Gabe said. "But dude, you take what you can get now and you hide that shit. Train people on the streets or what the fuck ever- that's where you're doing this, yeah?" He thought about the problem for a moment. "So why'd everyone say yes? Do you know that part? You need that to make it all work." (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

palehorses
2010-06-21 06:56 am UTC (link)

He grinned again, and it was sharply dismissive. "Course I'm not doing this, let alone on the streets. Again, point taken, and I like it, but you're not seeing what the situation is. Right now, and seriously, this is my best guess, people see the house as protection, and they're hiding - most of them - behind the idea that Katherine hands them fucking orders when she wants something done, you know? Until she says hop, most've them are fine not figuring out how to jump on their own. Same time, it's a bad fucking idea to be out in the wild if you're an ace or a joker, so Katherine's offer came at a great time. But I don't think the ideological underpinnings are fucking there - I know they're fucking not. And until that's in play, training won't happen. Hell, until it fucking does, I might not be in play. Don't want to spend the next six months beating my head against entrenched fear and laziness when I could walk right the fuck now and set something like this up with people who want to make the change that needs to happen, you know? Not saying that I think everyone in the house is a fucking loss, just that right now, I don't trust them as professional heroes any further than I can fucking piss in a hurricane, you know?"

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	afterwedie 2010-06-21 07:05 am UTC (link)
	"Then call them to order. Take whoever signs on, maybe." Gabe wasn't grasping the difficulty, not entirely, though he knew part of it was simply knowing none of them. "Um... can't you just, like, pull a Bangaro and fake an enemy?" Bangaro had been five presidential terms before- the first president to have been caught manufacturing his own war. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

palehorses
2010-06-21 07:07 am UTC (link)

"Fuck no," Matt said. "If they don't believe the Acts are enemy enough, I'm not fucking making shit up." His voice twisted with repugnance. "I'll work with what I've got. And I hope you're saying that you're part of it, because if not, this is one fucking disappointing conversation. But I won't lie to convert someone to something they don't believe is right, you know?" He smiled. "I'd make a fucking terrible politician, man."

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	afterwedie 2010-06-21 07:10 am UTC (link)
	"Yeah, you're right. You sound pretty fucking desperate though." Gabe bit his lip, considering it. "Yeah. I think I could be in. I don't want on the payroll. I've got a place to work." (Reply to this) (Parent)

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