[ He doesn't see an immediate need to poke more fun at Stephen via text when he's sure he'll get to do so in person, so Nate selects a bottle of one of their smokier whiskies and ventures down, down into the bunker. ]
Special delivery.
[ He says at the halfway point, ducking his head under something structural and wandering into the muted glow of subdued, subterranean lighting. ]
[ Called from somewhere deeper in the safehouse, the deadpan of it a stone's throw from him switching the line to Sure, Mom.
His voice is all the clue Nate gets as to his location, but it's not a big place. Stephen's in the medical room, the one place in the less advanced cousin of their main Displaced hideaway to have a fixed neural interface screen. It fills the back wall of the room, and on it Stephen has pinned images of various neural imaging scans, charts and brain mapping.
He's finishing up the last few digits of an externally meaningless code pinned to the center of the screen when Nate makes it into the room, taking his attention away (though the characters continue to be added, if slightly slower, even as he turns to inspect Nate's offering.) ]
[ He shoots right back with faux sincerity, giving one last glance to the door above him. As many times as he's gone underground in some form or another, he's never been a fan of having one exit.
Light shifts from a couple corners away and Nate follows the trail, wandering into the medical room and immediately distracted by the images on the wall. He's no doctor, but it looks like CT scan stuff, just considerably more intense and detailed. Some three-dimensional, with color-coded areas. A lot of lingo he couldn't even begin to parse.
Nate hums and sets the bottle on the table next to Stephen, hands on his hips. ]
[ It's a wall of beyond PhD-level neuroscientific research and he finds himself hilarious.
Stephen turns briefly away and before you know it there are two glass beakers set down on the table beside the bottle. Could he go to the kitchen? Sure. But why waste the time when company and alcohol are both right here?
He talks as he pours out a couple of measures. ]
Procrastinating.
[ Sometimes you just need to take a break from management bureaucracy to do a little theoretical study of your almost comically apt power. ]
[ Nate quips, pulling one of the beakers toward him and examining the interior of the glass for a moment as if anticipating some sort of corrosive residue. There's none in there besides the alcohol, of which he takes a very healthy sip.
He lets the moment settle and his eyes glaze over a little at the content on the screen, none of which is of salient interest to him, hip resting on the table's edge. ]
[ It takes an extraordinary amount of self control to not make a smartass comment about being a smartass, but there's alcohol in his beaker and it's distraction enough. In the time Nate drinks and drifts, Stephen wheels out his swivel chair and takes a seat.
The question is met with no small amount of skepticism. ]
Is this you getting ready to invite me on a minibreak? It's a little soon. We haven't even been for dinner yet.
[ Let him live, Nate? He's been busy. But to spare them both the rigmarole of maneuvering around his blatant deflection: ]
I was in New Beijing a couple of months back.
[ Or perhaps instead we'll go with deflection 2.0, "I left the city to go to another city to try to make sure as few people as possible died at the hands of the UNA." Willful ignorance is holding onto the very slim possibility that he's being asked out of idle curiosity and not as the beginnings of a point that makes itself. ]
Edited (needed.... more wheelies) 2020-03-09 22:35 (UTC)
Don't get ahead of yourself, you haven't even bought me flowers.
[ Nate points out with his beaker, eyebrows raised.
(He doesn't know if it was an offer, or a simple question. Things are weird, moving from one world wherein he possessed a robust friend group, to another where he has been forced to start from scratch. Even asking somebody to hang out feels presumptuous in New Amsterdam, and he hates that.)
What Stephen defers to is something with which Nate isn't all that familiar, which blessedly gives him the opportunity to sidestep the subject. ]
[ Ha. A tilt of his head, concession to the point. He'll add it to his to-do.
As for the rest - tell him about it. Though he's felt the strain of staying in one place a lot less the longer he's been here. The worst of the trapped feeling has gone, just in time for him to have all but limitless access to the world in an approximation of the way he once did.
Nate's admission still begs a question. ]
A frequent flier?
[ Is it travel, or just wide open spaces that he misses? ]
[ Less so, these days. With his work largely home-bound to New Orleans, the opportunities for getting away are few and far between, particularly when he made the conscious decision to be as legitimate as possible with business arrangements. It took Nate a long time to get out of less-than-legal acquisitions.
None of that really applies here, he supposes. ]
Used to be out of the states more often than I was in them. You?
[ He raises that eyebrow raise a tip of his drink in Nate's direction, a chipper little smile. When your entire life is an inside joke with yourself, many things are funny. ]
Any time. [ Sip, and an immediate change of subject. ] Where will you go next?
[ The disparity is addressed, the challenge assessed, and the subject abruptly averted. Nate doesn't bother pointing it out because he's fairly certain they're both operating on a very high level of keeping personal things personal. ]
I dunno. Central or South America, maybe? I grew up around there.
[ There's something delightfully accusatory in that question and Nate smiles in spite of himself. Usually people will accompany a statement like the one he made with an addendum - I was an Army brat, or something similar - but Nate cannot claim such humble and provincial origins as being shifted around with frequency due to Uncle Sam's ever-changing whims. ]
We traveled a lot. I was a kid, and my older brother picked up odd jobs where he could.
[ Which is as personal as he's willing to get without venturing into territory that some have derisively called Dickensian. ]
[ Parentless and complicated. Nate doesn't have too many reservations giving the plainest of facts about his childhood, but the intimate details are better left for those he knows won't judge him, and he isn't entirely sure where he stands with Stephen yet outside of a general working respect. ]
Nebraska, really? Great Plains must've driven you nuts.
[ Middle America isn't a place Nate has ever actually visited much - if at all - and part of that is just due to the lack of historicity. ]
I was born in Boston, which is about as much a polar opposite as possible. And the accents-
[ He was marooned on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean before he came here, so being trapped in a future where everyone he knows is probably gone is something of a lateral move. Nate can feel himself drifting into that distracted listlessness again and fights it with a thin excuse for a smile. ]
Yeah.
[ He's fucking lonely. Judging by their current surroundings it seems like Stephen knows the sensation intimately. Nate lifts his beaker in a mock toast. ]
[ There's a shift. Stephen quiets, seeking out evidence, and finds it in the raise of a makeshift glass and the unconvincing tilt of a smile. ]
... To coping mechanisms.
[ Three small words and a beaker raised in turn. A greater concession to struggle than any other he's given in— nine months.
He drains his glass. Wonders if he's ever put any real thought into what his coping mechanisms are, the liquor burning a path down his throat aside. But of course, he's standing in the basement of the product of them: a business pulled out of nowhere, a "home" without personality or comfort, all of his resources poured back into the bar so that others might be better supported. No time to dwell. Less room for guilt.
The empty glass in his hand and the company it's shared with is an admission of its own, one that takes him slightly by surprise. It shows the first sprouting shoots of a willingness, however infrequent, to allow himself a little break for air. ]
And to limitless supply.
[ Which is to say he's pouring himself another, bottle lifted in question. Top up? ]
Edited (this thread was Some Time ago and even this correction is incorrect but I'm too lazy to run the numbers bye) 2020-04-19 22:18 (UTC)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
It's open.
no subject
Special delivery.
[ He says at the halfway point, ducking his head under something structural and wandering into the muted glow of subdued, subterranean lighting. ]
Tell me you got fresh air today.
no subject
[ Called from somewhere deeper in the safehouse, the deadpan of it a stone's throw from him switching the line to Sure, Mom.
His voice is all the clue Nate gets as to his location, but it's not a big place. Stephen's in the medical room, the one place in the less advanced cousin of their main Displaced hideaway to have a fixed neural interface screen. It fills the back wall of the room, and on it Stephen has pinned images of various neural imaging scans, charts and brain mapping.
He's finishing up the last few digits of an externally meaningless code pinned to the center of the screen when Nate makes it into the room, taking his attention away (though the characters continue to be added, if slightly slower, even as he turns to inspect Nate's offering.) ]
Oh, good choice.
no subject
[ He shoots right back with faux sincerity, giving one last glance to the door above him. As many times as he's gone underground in some form or another, he's never been a fan of having one exit.
Light shifts from a couple corners away and Nate follows the trail, wandering into the medical room and immediately distracted by the images on the wall. He's no doctor, but it looks like CT scan stuff, just considerably more intense and detailed. Some three-dimensional, with color-coded areas. A lot of lingo he couldn't even begin to parse.
Nate hums and sets the bottle on the table next to Stephen, hands on his hips. ]
Light reading?
no subject
[ It's a wall of beyond PhD-level neuroscientific research and he finds himself hilarious.
Stephen turns briefly away and before you know it there are two glass beakers set down on the table beside the bottle. Could he go to the kitchen? Sure. But why waste the time when company and alcohol are both right here?
He talks as he pours out a couple of measures. ]
Procrastinating.
[ Sometimes you just need to take a break from management bureaucracy to do a little theoretical study of your almost comically apt power. ]
no subject
[ Nate quips, pulling one of the beakers toward him and examining the interior of the glass for a moment as if anticipating some sort of corrosive residue. There's none in there besides the alcohol, of which he takes a very healthy sip.
He lets the moment settle and his eyes glaze over a little at the content on the screen, none of which is of salient interest to him, hip resting on the table's edge. ]
When's the last time you got out of the city?
no subject
The question is met with no small amount of skepticism. ]
Is this you getting ready to invite me on a minibreak? It's a little soon. We haven't even been for dinner yet.
[ Let him live, Nate? He's been busy. But to spare them both the rigmarole of maneuvering around his blatant deflection: ]
I was in New Beijing a couple of months back.
[ Or perhaps instead we'll go with deflection 2.0, "I left the city to go to another city to try to make sure as few people as possible died at the hands of the UNA." Willful ignorance is holding onto the very slim possibility that he's being asked out of idle curiosity and not as the beginnings of a point that makes itself. ]
no subject
[ Nate points out with his beaker, eyebrows raised.
(He doesn't know if it was an offer, or a simple question. Things are weird, moving from one world wherein he possessed a robust friend group, to another where he has been forced to start from scratch. Even asking somebody to hang out feels presumptuous in New Amsterdam, and he hates that.)
What Stephen defers to is something with which Nate isn't all that familiar, which blessedly gives him the opportunity to sidestep the subject. ]
I'm just- feeling cramped, I guess.
no subject
As for the rest - tell him about it. Though he's felt the strain of staying in one place a lot less the longer he's been here. The worst of the trapped feeling has gone, just in time for him to have all but limitless access to the world in an approximation of the way he once did.
Nate's admission still begs a question. ]
A frequent flier?
[ Is it travel, or just wide open spaces that he misses? ]
no subject
[ Less so, these days. With his work largely home-bound to New Orleans, the opportunities for getting away are few and far between, particularly when he made the conscious decision to be as legitimate as possible with business arrangements. It took Nate a long time to get out of less-than-legal acquisitions.
None of that really applies here, he supposes. ]
Used to be out of the states more often than I was in them. You?
no subject
Likewise. [ Does extradimensional travel count as abroad? Space? ] Work takes me all over.
no subject
That's both vague and ominous, thank you.
no subject
Any time. [ Sip, and an immediate change of subject. ] Where will you go next?
no subject
I dunno. Central or South America, maybe? I grew up around there.
[ Mostly. ]
no subject
[ An entire continent and a handful of other countries on the side? Nice neighborhood. Welcome to the vague brigade, Drake. ]
no subject
We traveled a lot. I was a kid, and my older brother picked up odd jobs where he could.
[ Which is as personal as he's willing to get without venturing into territory that some have derisively called Dickensian. ]
no subject
Instead the file is dismissed as closed with a raise of his brows, and he offers up: ]
I grew up in Nebraska, so you've got me beat.
no subject
Nebraska, really? Great Plains must've driven you nuts.
[ Middle America isn't a place Nate has ever actually visited much - if at all - and part of that is just due to the lack of historicity. ]
I was born in Boston, which is about as much a polar opposite as possible. And the accents-
[ GRIMACE ]
no subject
Well, we both made it out. [ ... ] Maybe a little too far out.
no subject
Yeah.
[ He's fucking lonely. Judging by their current surroundings it seems like Stephen knows the sensation intimately. Nate lifts his beaker in a mock toast. ]
To coping mechanisms?
no subject
... To coping mechanisms.
[ Three small words and a beaker raised in turn. A greater concession to struggle than any other he's given in— nine months.
He drains his glass. Wonders if he's ever put any real thought into what his coping mechanisms are, the liquor burning a path down his throat aside. But of course, he's standing in the basement of the product of them: a business pulled out of nowhere, a "home" without personality or comfort, all of his resources poured back into the bar so that others might be better supported. No time to dwell. Less room for guilt.
The empty glass in his hand and the company it's shared with is an admission of its own, one that takes him slightly by surprise. It shows the first sprouting shoots of a willingness, however infrequent, to allow himself a little break for air. ]
And to limitless supply.
[ Which is to say he's pouring himself another, bottle lifted in question. Top up? ]