2019-07-23 - Accosted

Itzhak clatters down the stairs to the parking lot, and doesn't stop there, but keeps going all the way out to the corner. Finally he stops there, shaking a cigarette out of the pack and lighting it.

August takes the stairs much slower. He's in no hurry, wants to give Itzhak at least a minute or two of alone time before checking on him. Accordingly, he doesn't show up at the corner until after Itzhak has his smoke out and has had time for a few drags. "Hey," he says, like they weren't just in a meeting to discuss a haunted house that was mad at them and sending personalized nasty grams.

Itzhak grunts, flicking ash off the end of the smoke. "Too much," he mutters. He's staring fixedly at something. Nothing in particular, just some point he's picked to stare at. He's also rocking back and forth gently, swaying in place, as if to music.

"Yeah that was a lot." A lot more than August had expected, in truth. Something called the 'Veil', something about people being able to go in and out of it, something else about being able to nullify rooms, and that one guy (had he introduced himself?) acting paranoid as fuck...

A lot. Too much.

"Yeah," he agrees again, runs a hand over his face. "He hasn't shown up to fuck with you again, has he?" Not that Skeletor needs to; no doubt the original nightmares are spawning plenty of aftershocks. Still, it seems like a pertinent question.

Itzhak sniffs, hard. "Don't think so. Think I'd feel it." His right hand drifts up to his chest, rubbing over his heart. He's wearing a white t-shirt today, in classic greaser fashion, and when he presses the thin fabric to his skin, another tattoo shows through. "Not to say I ain't had nightmares anyway."

He inhales the last of the cigarette, stubs it out and tosses it in a trash can. "Sorry," he mutters. "Runnin' out of there like an idiot."

August makes a low sound, ducks his head. His have been a wonderful blending of the two that fit so well together, but he knows them for what they are: more of the usual, just with a new twist. (Thanks, Skeletor.) He shakes his head, waves a hand at the apology.

"Nah. Don't be. If you have to get out you do, it's not anyone's business why. And if they have a problem with it they can keep it to themfuckingselves." He says this with the same frankness he might use to explain why English ivy is an invasive and the entire Pacific Northwest will be better off when everyone stops planting it.

Sighing out in a whoosh, Itzhak rubs his fingers through his curly black hair. "Yeah. I mean, I know. I just spent way too long as a kid bein' told I couldn't do it because people might notice there was something different about me. God for-fuckin'-bid, right?"

He's still swaying, but he glances over at August, his expression desperately unhappy. "How's by you. You okay?"

August snorts, nods. "Yeah they love to lean into that, don't they? Don't date be anything but a perfectly well adjusted normal straight kid from a nuclear family in the suburbs. If you didn't win that lottery, well, good luck to you."

He's looking out over the neighborhood as he says that, eyes moving with some memory or another. Fights on playgrounds, arguments with teachers, sulking along the box cars in the railyard.

He blinks, looks back at Itzhak, shrugs. "Okay. Ish. Nothing I'm not used to." He means the added flavor to his nightmares, isn't really thinking of much else. Except... "Is there some kind of deal with Finch and Ignacio? They were acting, you know." Like there was a thing. But maybe it's just him and his assumptions about twenty year olds and their behavior. What would he know, it's been over two decades since he was that age.

"No Jew in history ever had good luck, and the streak ain't breaking with me."

Itzhak shrugs, accepting that August has nightmares so bad that even Skeletor can't make them much worse. "You remind me of a song, you know that, Roen? A couple of songs, even."

Then he's taken totally by surprise and coughs, laughing. "Seriously? Even I noticed. Yeah, they screwed." A gentler emotion surfaces on his mobile face, something yearning, before it sinks away. "They're a real fuckin' cute couple."

August laughs, bitter and humorless, about Itzhak not being the one to break the Jewish Bad Luck streak. He raises his eyebrows. "Yeah? Which song?"

But now his ability to notice things is being called into question. "Look, I try to stay out of as much of my employees private lives as I can, you know? The less I know about who's doing who the better." He grimaces, though, because that's totally not working out in the overall, immediately shrugs it aside. "But that definitely explains it. Okay. Keeping that in mind."

"Ehhh, fair." Itzhak flips over a hand. "But they're not gonna keep it secret or anything, you know that, right? They're gonna shove it in your face sooner or later. Probably sooner, knowing them. They're just like that, you know? Out loud and fearless. De Santos could fertilize the whole Dust Bowl with the amount of bullshit comin' out of him, and if you want a straight answer you'd better hope it's a blue moon, but. Yannow. He's still a decent honest guy. The putz."

He gets out the cigarettes again, considers smoking another, puts them away. When he talks again, he's actually singing, soft.

"//And it's one, two, three,
What are we fightin' for?
Don't know don't give a damn,
Next stop is Viet-Nam...//"

August starts laughing at Itzhak's explanation and description. Eventually he doubles over from it, come up at wipes at his eyes. "Christ, I needed that. Thanks." He takes a breath, tips his head back. "Yeah well, they'll get the usual talk. No fucking on the business property or in the trucks. Otherwise as long as they don't bring problems to work it's their business, which isn't mine." Or he wants it to be that way, but who knows if that'll stick. He's probably to familiar with them already.

What a mess.

He arches an eyebrow at the song. "Well...Sarajevo was no Vietnam, but...the sentiment's sure on point." He sighs, folds his arms. Thinks of those scars he saw on Ignacio. "Guess we've all got a hell of a lot on common," he says to the ground.

Itzhak grins back at August, the weathered corners of his eyes crinkling. He's so handsome, in his quirky way, when he smiles. It happens so rarely, the contrast is obvious. "Roen, I'm gonna be square with you here. The fastest way to get them to fuck on the property is to tell them they can't."

He thwaps August on the chest as punctuation--and his eyes go wide and unfocused. "Jesus," he says, a little strangled.

August groans, because Itzhak's right. "This is easier with the rest of them. No possible way to have interest in one another." He sighs, rubs his forehead with the palm of his hand.

Until Itzhak touches him, and he jerks in surprise at Itzhak's reaction. Pins and screws in his spine, a clavicle hook in his left shoulder, a plate on one thighbone, something else in his left ribs. They're old, they've been there a long time, titanium neatly knitted to bone, but they ache when the weather turns. He spends a lot of winter nights bundled up by the woodstove reading.

He takes in a steadying breath. Maybe he's imagining the twinge of the metal. Maybe not. "You can feel them," he says, guessing, eyes narrowed.

Itzhak spreads his hand on August's chest, far too intimate a touch for either their friendship or where they are. He really settles his fingers and the curves of his palm snugly against the muscles there. "You're as full of metal as de Santos," he mutters, staring right through August. "His are fresh, though, and yours ain't. Fresher, anyway."

This is one of the weird things that August has found glimmer does: it normalizes things which would otherwise be objectionable. A gesture that would usually get Itzhak's hand swatted (at a minimum) just gets him a distant look, almost like August is trying to do the same thing. He's not as sensitive as Itzhak, though, not to things inorganic. He knows where the metal is in a very different way than glimmer would tell him.

"Yeah. Would've been worse, but...there was someone in that hospital, doing what Finch and I can do. A little at a time. Not much, but enough to get me to this point. And not just me. Must've been...hundreds of us they were helping like that. Thousands, maybe, over the years. Getting people just a little bit better." He sighs. "That's why I still try healing people, even though it's fucking awful. Because of whoever that was, in that VA hospital, doing what they could. Working with what they had."

His expression gets even more distant. "He's still really banged up. Whatever did that, it was bad. As bad as that building that fell on me."

The glimmer, or the song as Itzhak thinks of it, leads him to do things he ordinarily wouldn't. Like feel up a buddy's chest in the middle of the street. Itzhak shakes his hand out like it's got pins and needles. "Wrecks, the two of you," he says, briskly offering his professional diagnosis. "He didn't used to walk like that, you know. His whole face used to work, too." Then he hesitates, glancing away, shoving his hands in his pockets. "You're doing God's work," he says gruffly. "That's a great mitzvah. You shouldn't burn yourself out. Make yourself miserable every time, it's no good."

August snaps out of his reverie, gives Itzhak a wry smile. "Yeah? In your professional opinion as a guy who can feel metal?"

He mmmms, nods about Ignacio. "Maybe that's something it does, right? Pulls people together who didn't used to be. You wouldn't recognize me if you saw a picture of me before Bosnia. I was someone else, then. Sounds like maybe he was too." A brief lift of his eyebrows, maybe alluding to their argument from the other day, then he looks away and shrugs.

"I don't heal people very often. Hell, healing Finch after that storm, that was the first time I'd done it in a while. Seeing her sitting there, bleeding like that, I realized..." He licks his lips. "I have to get past it. That shit that happened, I have to convince myself that it's not still happening. I have to be able to do this." He shakes his head. "I'll figure it out eventually. Just going to take a while."

Itzhak rubs his eyes. He looks tired. "Look, I... I shouldn'ta made you get between me and de Santos. Just, Christ, he gets on my nerves sometimes. I used to be able to throw a punch at him and work it out, you know? Wasn't nothing serious. He knew if he tweaked me hard enough I'd go after him. Roughhousing, right? That was just kinda how we rolled. It ain't like that now. Like you said. He's not the same guy. He's a guy who was broken apart and pinned back together."

And he'd seen how Ignacio and Finch treated each other on that morning, but he can't bring himself to say that much to August. That's going to have to stay a secret shame along with all the other shameful secrets in his heart, like a dragon who hoards self-loathing.

He's not jealous. He swears to himself, he isn't. Only ...there's something, lurking there in his brainstem. Something. Not jealousy though. Absolutely not.

"So, nu, what'd you think of Irvriya?" Itzhak looks at August, blatantly changing the subject. As good as inviting him to tease him over her.

"Yeah," August says, again using that single word which acknowledges all the things that neither of them is going to say right now. "I know you two were just going to sort it out. I did plenty of that at his age. And, you can, if you want, or not--whatever, that's not for me to say. Not my business." He smiles, crooked. "Just, do it somewhere I'm not feeling noses break, okay? I'm not ready for that step just yet."

He mmmmms, and his smile becomes a grin. "She's nice--cute, ballsy as all hell, and she's got a PhD, right?" He gestures, that age old motion of, 'is there a reason you're not already asking her out'.

Itzhak shrugs with his eyebrows. "Fair enough." That nose of his has already seen more than its share of breakages, by the crooked tilt.

He grins back, crooked as well. "Yeah, she's a doctor." Shifting his weight back on one heel, he half-turns to see Minerva's office across the parking lot. "I dunno. I worry. A guy like me, you know? What do I really got to offer to someone like her?"

"Are you seriously asking me, a guy full of metal who lives out in the woods because he can't be in a city for too long and can barely heal someone without puking, what you, a genius mechanic who can play violin and runs his own shop and is reasonably good looking has to offer her?" August gives Itzhak one of those consternated frowns, which on a New Yorker would mean 'getouttahya' and on someone from the West Cost means, 'Wow, really'.

He doesn't wait for the inevitable list of personal defects. "She knows about all of this. She's obviously powerful." He gets a look like something's occurred to him, and his expression eases. "But I get it, if you're worried you'll be drawing attention to her." He shakes his head, puts his hands on his hips. "That's a thing, apparently--bad shit is drawn to people like us. Stronger people." He bobs his eyebrows, as if to say, 'aren't we lucky'.

Caught by surprise yet again (sneaky old man, August), Itzhak snorts and starts laughing, reddening, hand going over his eyes. "Listen, if that was all there was to me, this wouldn't be a problem! I'd be a goddamn prince." Yeah, there's a list of defects around here somewhere, but Itzhak doesn't go into them. Instead, he nods. "I'm stronger here than I ever been before, and I wasn't no slouch. It ain't just that, either. Not everything has to be weird to be dangerous." He spreads his hands, then jerks a thumb over his shoulder. "Gonna walk. You gotta take the lovebirds home." Haha, bird joke.

August laughs with Itzhak a bit, then sobers some. He gives Itzhak a long, even look. "Yeah," he says, of things not needing to be weird to be dangerous. He holds Itzhak's eyes a little too long for it to be a general agreement. More things that aren't going to be said.

He nods, turns to head back inside. "I'm telling Finch you said that," he says over his shoulder.