Gabriel & Sarah: Wilkommen, Bienvenue
Feb. 22nd, 2022 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsGabriel swings by Sarah's suite to welcome her to the mansion in the best way he knows how.
Their interaction had been admittedly brief, but Gabriel had decided pretty quickly he liked Sarah. Perhaps because he had been at underground parties busted by the cops, or because he, like most gay men, had a natural affinity for gruff, take-no-prisoners women.
He didn't interrogate it much; he just knew that it was enough to bring him to her door with a bottle of whiskey and a six-pack — options, he figured, were never a bad idea. He shifted the six-pack to the crook of his elbow and the whiskey to one hand, then knocked with the other.
Sarah stared from the couch for a moment at the door, trying to figure out who would be knocking here of all places. She flipped the overhead light switch on her way to the door and opened it slowly. "Oh! Hello--" she thought for a moment and it came to her. "Gabe!"
"That's me," he said with a smile and a nod. "I brought a little housewarming gift, if you—" He shifted the burden in his left arm uncomfortably. "Here." He grabbed the six-pack with his free hand. "Something so the fridge isn't empty. And, you know," he raised the bottle in his other, "the liquor cabinet."
She smiled broadly, and took the beer from him, backing up against the door to hold it open for him. "This is ridiculously thoughtful. Thank you." She put the beer in the fridge, and set the whiskey on the counter. May I offer you some of my newfound bounty?"
Gabriel chuckled. "Well," he said, following her in, "it would be rude not to." He cast a glance around her suite; it was fairly bare, just as his living space had been when he'd first arrived. How different he'd been, all those years and a universe ago; it took him so long to acknowledge he'd be staying. "How are you finding things?" He said, genuinely curious.
"I sleep like shit here." She shrugged, pulling two simple glasses out of a cabinet. They weren't made for liquor, but sometimes you had to make sacrifices. "It's not this place, I just don't sleep well away from home. Otherwise I feel like I walked into an alternate universe where everyone is so fucking nice. People have been feeding me like I'm walking around nothing but skin and bones." She snorted, and poured a portion of whiskey into each glass. It was a generous pour, but restrained enough that she had clearly poured drinks for others before.
Gabriel took the glass, swirling the whiskey around as he considered this. He eyed her for a second, wondering if the skin and bones comment was intentional wordplay. "Yeah," he said for a second. "It's fucking weird, right?" He clinked his glass against hers. "Cheers."
"Maybe it's just that I have spent my life navigating people with motives, but I have trouble trusting it right now." Sarah took a drink and sat back down on the couch. She gestured to offer Gabe a seat and curled her legs up underneath her. "I mean, you all have given me no reason to believe that this is anything but kindness, but when I met Peter out on the lawn I had a hard time convincing myself this wasn't some elaborate way to hand me over to the Russians."
He sat after taking a sip, glad he grabbed one of the nicer bottles from his collection. “I think,” he ventured carefully, “when you have spent a lifetime being wary, whatever the reason, you find it hard to believe anyone could be this earnest.” He shrugged, scooting back toward one end of the couch. “I dunno. That’s how I felt, anyway.”
"And now what do you think? Are they legit?" Sarah knew that asking someone on the inside wasn't going to get her the most reliable answer, but he seemed more likely to tell her the truth than some of the other people she had met. Maybe the truth would be somewhere in the middle.
"Define legit," Gabriel replied. "Everyone here has their own stories. Some are more sketchy than others. I trust most people here when the situation calls for it." He shrugged. "I dunno. I'm still here, aren't I? Been a few years. Long past the time when I didn't have another choice."
Sarah thought for a moment about what he had said. "How often do they take people in? It sounds like I'm not the only person who's used this place as temporary place to lie low."
"That's an interesting question," Gabriel said. "I'm not even really sure. I mean, the world's mostly not great for our kind, you know?" He took another sip of the whiskey. "I think everyone here wanted safety from something at one point, whether they knew it or not. It's all in degrees."
"I guess in a lot of ways I've been insulated from that. Our uncertainty when it happened was scary, no doubt. Plus, it was fucking ugly and painful on top of that. But nobody dared say anything to my face because they knew my Father." Every time she mentioned him in passing, she missed him more. She had been away before, sure, but she almost always had some way to contact him if she was feeling homesick. Here she just sat and wondered. "My Aunt thinks I am going to use my bones to subjugate the human race though, which is maybe not the thing you want written on your birthday cards. Or your arrest warrant as the case may be."
"If you've got a record, plenty of folks you'll fit in with here," Gabriel said, trying to lighten the mood a little. "My story's pretty stupid, if you want to know. I stole a necklace off this dangerous cat-lady, and she and her nutjob girlfriend came after me." He smiled a little, shaking his head. How simple his problems used to be. "Not my finest hour, I know. Things got kind of dicey and, you know..." He gestured around them. "Here I am."
She smiled behind the rim of the glass. "You didn't strike me as a jewelry thief. Was it a hired job? Or was it just pretty?"
"Very pretty," Gabriel smiled back. "And I was very broke." He swirled the whiskey in his drink. "Well, not very broke, but, you know..."
"Broke enough to think the lady in the expensive necklace was a good mark." She wondered idly how many times she had been someone's "lady in the expensive necklace". She liked to think her visible mutation warned most folks off, like the colors on a poison frog. "Did you get to keep the necklace?"
Gabriel snorted. “I did not. But I’ve had free rent for the last few years, so maybe I got the better end of the deal.” He’d also lived through the apocalypse and a trip to hell that still had him twisted up in ways he didn’t understand. You win some, you lose some.
“It has been nice not having to run,” he said, answering a question she hadn’t asked. “And the necklace was probably costume.”
Sarah shrugged. "More than likely. It's so easy to get a decent looking fake now. My brother Sebastian swears he can tell the difference, but he gave his first fiancee a ring that turned out to be very fake. Needless to say that engagement was a fucking disaster." She was chuckling while she told the story-- she could still see all their faces. The girl's shock, Sebastian's embarrassed fury, their Father's serene calm at being right yet again. "Do you get to see your family often?"
Gabriel's expression shifted; any mirth gone, replaced by something more guarded. "No," he said simply, sounding neither sad nor angry. "But others do, especially the ones whose families are close by." He followed that up with a bigger sip of his whiskey. "It's not a prison," he added. "You know, you can leave whenever you want. Though I guess in your case, there are other concerns."
"Temporarily," she added airily, but there was more than a little sense of warding there. Like if she didn't insist that it was only temporary, then it just might not be. She added quietly, "I'm sorry if I poked a sore spot. I forget that not everybody has a family worth being close to."
“Their loss,” Gabriel said with a dismissive shrug. It was as much as he wanted to say on the matter, especially to a stranger. “Glad yours is good to you,” he said, his features softening. “When you get out of here, you’ll have a good place to go.”
Sarah decided maybe he didn't need to hear about all the wonderful things that came with having a good family. She finished her drink and got up to get another, smaller pour. The first was big enough that she might actually feel it, but the second was honestly just for show. Her body metabolized it faster than she could consume it. "So what do you all do for fun around here? Other than visiting questionable boxing establishments and drinking behind closed doors, which suggests you are my kind of fucking people."
"Well, sometimes we drink in public. I'm in the city a lot, and so a lot of my fun tends to be there. Standard shit. Shows, booze, clubs. Other people have their hobbies and things. An annoying number of outdoors-y folks here."
"Gross," Sarah agreed, grimacing in distaste. "I prefer concrete under my feet, thanks. Plus, I think that whole electricity and indoor plumbing concept is really catching on."
"Right?" Gabriel shook his head. "Don't let Arthur hear you say that. I don't know him super well, but he's, like, a full-on mountain man."
"He's also a shitty driver." Sure, he had gotten them there in one piece and unarrested, but just the memory of that car ride made her queasy. She sat back down on the couch and sipped her whiskey. "You can tell him I said that."
Their interaction had been admittedly brief, but Gabriel had decided pretty quickly he liked Sarah. Perhaps because he had been at underground parties busted by the cops, or because he, like most gay men, had a natural affinity for gruff, take-no-prisoners women.
He didn't interrogate it much; he just knew that it was enough to bring him to her door with a bottle of whiskey and a six-pack — options, he figured, were never a bad idea. He shifted the six-pack to the crook of his elbow and the whiskey to one hand, then knocked with the other.
Sarah stared from the couch for a moment at the door, trying to figure out who would be knocking here of all places. She flipped the overhead light switch on her way to the door and opened it slowly. "Oh! Hello--" she thought for a moment and it came to her. "Gabe!"
"That's me," he said with a smile and a nod. "I brought a little housewarming gift, if you—" He shifted the burden in his left arm uncomfortably. "Here." He grabbed the six-pack with his free hand. "Something so the fridge isn't empty. And, you know," he raised the bottle in his other, "the liquor cabinet."
She smiled broadly, and took the beer from him, backing up against the door to hold it open for him. "This is ridiculously thoughtful. Thank you." She put the beer in the fridge, and set the whiskey on the counter. May I offer you some of my newfound bounty?"
Gabriel chuckled. "Well," he said, following her in, "it would be rude not to." He cast a glance around her suite; it was fairly bare, just as his living space had been when he'd first arrived. How different he'd been, all those years and a universe ago; it took him so long to acknowledge he'd be staying. "How are you finding things?" He said, genuinely curious.
"I sleep like shit here." She shrugged, pulling two simple glasses out of a cabinet. They weren't made for liquor, but sometimes you had to make sacrifices. "It's not this place, I just don't sleep well away from home. Otherwise I feel like I walked into an alternate universe where everyone is so fucking nice. People have been feeding me like I'm walking around nothing but skin and bones." She snorted, and poured a portion of whiskey into each glass. It was a generous pour, but restrained enough that she had clearly poured drinks for others before.
Gabriel took the glass, swirling the whiskey around as he considered this. He eyed her for a second, wondering if the skin and bones comment was intentional wordplay. "Yeah," he said for a second. "It's fucking weird, right?" He clinked his glass against hers. "Cheers."
"Maybe it's just that I have spent my life navigating people with motives, but I have trouble trusting it right now." Sarah took a drink and sat back down on the couch. She gestured to offer Gabe a seat and curled her legs up underneath her. "I mean, you all have given me no reason to believe that this is anything but kindness, but when I met Peter out on the lawn I had a hard time convincing myself this wasn't some elaborate way to hand me over to the Russians."
He sat after taking a sip, glad he grabbed one of the nicer bottles from his collection. “I think,” he ventured carefully, “when you have spent a lifetime being wary, whatever the reason, you find it hard to believe anyone could be this earnest.” He shrugged, scooting back toward one end of the couch. “I dunno. That’s how I felt, anyway.”
"And now what do you think? Are they legit?" Sarah knew that asking someone on the inside wasn't going to get her the most reliable answer, but he seemed more likely to tell her the truth than some of the other people she had met. Maybe the truth would be somewhere in the middle.
"Define legit," Gabriel replied. "Everyone here has their own stories. Some are more sketchy than others. I trust most people here when the situation calls for it." He shrugged. "I dunno. I'm still here, aren't I? Been a few years. Long past the time when I didn't have another choice."
Sarah thought for a moment about what he had said. "How often do they take people in? It sounds like I'm not the only person who's used this place as temporary place to lie low."
"That's an interesting question," Gabriel said. "I'm not even really sure. I mean, the world's mostly not great for our kind, you know?" He took another sip of the whiskey. "I think everyone here wanted safety from something at one point, whether they knew it or not. It's all in degrees."
"I guess in a lot of ways I've been insulated from that. Our uncertainty when it happened was scary, no doubt. Plus, it was fucking ugly and painful on top of that. But nobody dared say anything to my face because they knew my Father." Every time she mentioned him in passing, she missed him more. She had been away before, sure, but she almost always had some way to contact him if she was feeling homesick. Here she just sat and wondered. "My Aunt thinks I am going to use my bones to subjugate the human race though, which is maybe not the thing you want written on your birthday cards. Or your arrest warrant as the case may be."
"If you've got a record, plenty of folks you'll fit in with here," Gabriel said, trying to lighten the mood a little. "My story's pretty stupid, if you want to know. I stole a necklace off this dangerous cat-lady, and she and her nutjob girlfriend came after me." He smiled a little, shaking his head. How simple his problems used to be. "Not my finest hour, I know. Things got kind of dicey and, you know..." He gestured around them. "Here I am."
She smiled behind the rim of the glass. "You didn't strike me as a jewelry thief. Was it a hired job? Or was it just pretty?"
"Very pretty," Gabriel smiled back. "And I was very broke." He swirled the whiskey in his drink. "Well, not very broke, but, you know..."
"Broke enough to think the lady in the expensive necklace was a good mark." She wondered idly how many times she had been someone's "lady in the expensive necklace". She liked to think her visible mutation warned most folks off, like the colors on a poison frog. "Did you get to keep the necklace?"
Gabriel snorted. “I did not. But I’ve had free rent for the last few years, so maybe I got the better end of the deal.” He’d also lived through the apocalypse and a trip to hell that still had him twisted up in ways he didn’t understand. You win some, you lose some.
“It has been nice not having to run,” he said, answering a question she hadn’t asked. “And the necklace was probably costume.”
Sarah shrugged. "More than likely. It's so easy to get a decent looking fake now. My brother Sebastian swears he can tell the difference, but he gave his first fiancee a ring that turned out to be very fake. Needless to say that engagement was a fucking disaster." She was chuckling while she told the story-- she could still see all their faces. The girl's shock, Sebastian's embarrassed fury, their Father's serene calm at being right yet again. "Do you get to see your family often?"
Gabriel's expression shifted; any mirth gone, replaced by something more guarded. "No," he said simply, sounding neither sad nor angry. "But others do, especially the ones whose families are close by." He followed that up with a bigger sip of his whiskey. "It's not a prison," he added. "You know, you can leave whenever you want. Though I guess in your case, there are other concerns."
"Temporarily," she added airily, but there was more than a little sense of warding there. Like if she didn't insist that it was only temporary, then it just might not be. She added quietly, "I'm sorry if I poked a sore spot. I forget that not everybody has a family worth being close to."
“Their loss,” Gabriel said with a dismissive shrug. It was as much as he wanted to say on the matter, especially to a stranger. “Glad yours is good to you,” he said, his features softening. “When you get out of here, you’ll have a good place to go.”
Sarah decided maybe he didn't need to hear about all the wonderful things that came with having a good family. She finished her drink and got up to get another, smaller pour. The first was big enough that she might actually feel it, but the second was honestly just for show. Her body metabolized it faster than she could consume it. "So what do you all do for fun around here? Other than visiting questionable boxing establishments and drinking behind closed doors, which suggests you are my kind of fucking people."
"Well, sometimes we drink in public. I'm in the city a lot, and so a lot of my fun tends to be there. Standard shit. Shows, booze, clubs. Other people have their hobbies and things. An annoying number of outdoors-y folks here."
"Gross," Sarah agreed, grimacing in distaste. "I prefer concrete under my feet, thanks. Plus, I think that whole electricity and indoor plumbing concept is really catching on."
"Right?" Gabriel shook his head. "Don't let Arthur hear you say that. I don't know him super well, but he's, like, a full-on mountain man."
"He's also a shitty driver." Sure, he had gotten them there in one piece and unarrested, but just the memory of that car ride made her queasy. She sat back down on the couch and sipped her whiskey. "You can tell him I said that."
