2019-12-16 - The stick jockey and the jarhead

Near the end of the dock, there are picnic tables. At this hour, they're abandoned, though there are lights along the paths that lead to the dock proper, and the dock itself. And on one of them, sits a little flickering light. A candle lantern of glass and brass, to illuminate the book sitting on the table....and the sere features of the man who sits reading it. The light glints off the glasses he wears. He didn't used to, pilots have to have more or less perfect vision, but then....age and time catch up to everyone, don't they?

There's a storm rolling in tonight; anyone with half a nose can smell it, ozone with a hint of brine. The lantern flickers as the wind picks up and the ocean surges against the shore with a distant crash and fury; and unfurls again slow with a sigh. Some idiot's decided this would be a good night for a walk, with the rain that's started peppering the sand and greeting the sea. Dark shape coming up the slip, silhouette suggesting a ball cap and jacket and cargo pants, and the cherry of a cigarette visible briefly in the gloom. He slows as he approaches the occupied picnic table, and his features come into hazy focus; might be that cop from earlier. Small town like this, they're bound to run into one another again.

Now....now he's expected. The reader closes his book, and rises. The candlelight falls on a worn book, old enough to have no dust jacket. Just the stamped title: Captain Blood. It's slipped into the pocket of the pea coat he's wearing. Then he's waiting for the newcomer, snagging the lantern lazily in a hand, as if sure they'd both be going somewhere together. "De la Vega," Joe says, warmth and welcome and amusement in his tone. But not certainty of reciprocation - there's a wariness in the faded blue eyes. Like he half-suspects the reply will be a warning to weigh anchor and get the hell out.

The interloper moves like a jackal, or like a wolf. Prowlish and spare, hunger tempered by efficiency, like he doesn't have the energy to fritter away. He steps right up to where Joseph's parked himself, and comes to a halt some feet away. A glimpse is caught of the book before it vanishes into the other man's coat, and his dark eyes narrow slightly like he's caught the scent of something particularly intriguing. "Cavanaugh," he returns after a long pause, tonguetip pushed against the inside of his cheek, then away as he goes for a pull of his smoke. "Todos somos salvajes bajo el manto que la civilización nos hace." A tip of his chin, and then he switches to English; that low, scratchy-warm drawl of his that's been roughened somewhat by the years, "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Sorry. Never did learn Spanish," Joe replies, with no real contrition there. "Glad t'see you, too." He jerks a thumb at the dock where the boats ride at anchor, jostling gently with the increasing swell. "Wind blew me in, 'bout ten days ago. I intend to winter here - I'm in no shape to fight the northern Pacific now." A beat, and even that hint of the old smile fades. "I owe you a solid twice over. You saved my life and you didn't deep six my career when you coulda. You want me to stay out of your way, I'll do it, best I can. Can't promise to leave, not yet."

A soft, amused snort from the cop at the never did learn Spanish. He continues to peruse the other man carefully, angles in a bit closer with a skiff of sand off his boots as the wind kicks up. "Blew you in," he repeats, with a smile teasing at the corners of his mouth and dark eyes. It isn't a friendly smile; there's always something vaguely predatory about the man. He's shed - or tried to - any pretense of being a military man, years ago. "Is this where I say something about how this town isn't big enough for the two of us?" He paces in closer again, passing close to Joseph though not quite touching as he goes to take a lean against the picnic table. Smoke's exhaled out his nose, ash flicked from the end of his cigarette. "You want some friendly advice?"

He sets the little lantern down, gently. Enough wind slips past the glass panels to make the flame flicker wildly. "I dunno, is it?" There it is, the old insolent drawl, if tempered by something that might still be affection. And the lazy, crooked grin, undimmed by the years' passage. The ghost of that arrogant youth. "I 'xpect I'm gonna get it, whether I want it or not. But I'll hear you out, Don Diego. What's the news?" Even now he can't entirely resist the temptation to needle. Not mellowed so much by the years or the miles as one might expect.

A bark of laughter from de la Vega. His eyes are hard to get a read on with that damn ball cap on, but the dimples are hard to miss. "You're still a fucking prick, Cavanaugh." Another chuckle, this one smothered by the pull he takes off his smoke, and his head turns so he can watch the tide come in. Waves whipped up by the wind, the roar of the undertow. "This place.." His eyes flick back to the other man, and take him in with a slow crawl from head to toe. God, how many years has it been?

"It'll kill you. If you let it." The glow of his cigarette illuminates the ink scrawled up the back of his hand, and up to the first knuckle of each finger. Far more ink than any cop has a right to be sporting. Much of it, Joseph would remember from his time in the Marines; the semper fi along his collarbone, the names etched indelibly into his flank. The knuckle tatts, though, are new.

"It'll kill you slowly. A little here, a little there. You should leave." He flicks more ash from his smoke, watches Joseph steadily.

To which, he bows theatrically, in acknowledgement. Guilty as charged. When he straightens, though, there's no longer that glint of arrogance. Something almost peaceful, like resignation....or recognition. Still tall and slim, though the epicene prettiness of youth has faded into angular severity, with silver threads in the dark blond hair.
The lines time has stamped on him are of good nature....and with his coat on, the scars can't be seen.

"I know," he says, and his voice is gentle. No bluster about not being afraid. "It may well. But it will certainly do so if I go. It's been a long, hard fight just to get this far. I am grateful for the warning, nonetheless, de la Vega. A third service you've done me." Oddly formal, that last, as if it were important it be acknowledged, whether the intent is kindly or no.

Always with a flair for the dramatic, this man. You're such a princess, he'd have said back in those days. And, fucking stick jockeys. Never mind his admiration for the man's raw skill in the cockpit, there are things a Marine will never say to a pilot. "You don't owe me anything," he feels the need to point out, in the wake of the man informing him of the service he's done. He flicks more ash from his cigarette, brings it to his mouth, exhales through his nose. Time's changed him, too; put some grey in his beard, sketched a few more lines around his eyes. Gone is his six pack, but it's clear he visits the gym pretty regularly, and keeps himself in decent shape. Has to, probably, to stay in the force. "And you can quit being so formal with me, too. The fuck I'm no officer, officer." Sir? Never.

The ancient compacts and rivalries - cat and dog, pilot and poor bloody infantry. "Bullshit, I don't," Joe says, and the laughter's back, the gleam in the blue eyes. "C'mon. Y'all pulled me off a mountainside in the Korengal and toted me right the fuck back down when I was out of my gourd on Fentanyl and the Taliban were all over us like ants on a gummibear. You didn't rat me out when you coulda. If you'd said the wrong thing to the right MP, my ass'd've been bounced out on a blue ticket...and goodbye, NASA. I had a good career 'cause of you. You don't like the idea of a debt, that's fine. I'm not here to piss in your cornflakes or parachute in and fuck up your life. You always thought I was a prick and I sure was. Now gimme a cigarette." And he holds out a hand, curls the fingers beckoningly. "For old times' sake."

"Just doing my job." Slow, scratchy-warm drawl again. His smile's even slower, and his eyes are distant for a moment. Like he's remembering that day. The day they pulled him out. The fucking heat in the afternoon and the cold at night, and the shelled-out village they had to bunker down in for four days, and being woken by gunfire, and trying to sleep by gunfire. But they didn't really sleep, did they? And they haven't forgotten an inch of it. It was more than just doing his job. But damned if he'll say it.

"What makes you think I'm worried about you fucking up my life?" he ventures after a time, digging out his pack of cigarettes and tapping one out for Joseph. He's going to have to come and get it, though.

"Buuulllshiiit," Joe says again, this time invoking the ancient Southern ritual of adding gratuitous syllables to a given obscenity. "Only a Marine," he adds, with that tolerant affection.

They found him dangling from a scrub pine, like a kid's discarded doll. What a pleasant surprise when the mask came off: that pilot, for once out like a light and unable to run his mouth. But hurt by the descent - they had to more less carry him, half-delirious with pain. Casevac driven off for all that time, what should've been a few hours turned into that days' long slog. And white-faced gratitude back on the boat, when they finally made it. Medals and commendations, too.

One of those artless shrugs, as he ambles over to take the cigarette. He's got his own light, though, a battered brass Zippo. "Time was I had a talent for it, is all."

The cigarette's held out, slid free of the pack. Given a waggle as if to say, hurry the fuck up. "You flew your plane better, I wouldn't have to do my job," he razzes, waiting for Joseph to take the smoke before shoving the pack into his jacket pocket. Battered old thing, looks and smells like leather. Then his own cigarette's brought to his lips again, nostrils flared for the exhale of smoke that washes over him and melts into the wet night. "Mm. Talent for what, fucking up my life?" Sliver of dark eyes under the brim of his cap, amused and curious and something else. "I think I did a pretty good job of that, all on my own." Fighting with anyone and everyone. Fucking all the wrong people. Insubordination, being fucking Mexican. His list of transgressions is a mile long.

"C'mon, man, that airframe was older'n either of us," he retorts. "Equipment failure ain't my fault." The old, familiar argument. He snags the cigarette, gets the Zippo lit with that familiar clink-pop. The light of it momentarily illuminates the planes of his face, and then it's just the ember, brightening and ebbing with his breath. "Well, man, you were a Marine. They don't pick y'all for your level-headed common sense," he points out graciously, before blowing smoke politely downwind, out of the corner of his mouth. The Zippo he tucks away in a coat pocket. "Listen, my boat's over there. You wanna drink? Nothin' but beer and whisky, aboard for now, but you're welcome to some."

Another of those warm, throaty chortles when the old airframe's old, man argument is trotted out. "Equipment failure ain't your fault," he says in time with Joseph, trying to imitate his treacle-sweet drawl. And failing miserably, of course, because his accent's all slurred consonants and soft transitions. He tries to hide it, but it sneaks back out at the most inopportune moments. "No. I suppose they don't, do they." He still looks amused, though a layer of it's washed away at the offer that's made. His eyes slide in the direction of over there, and he brings the smoke to his lips again. It's a long moment before he replies, like the question reminds him of something, and he has to reel his thoughts back in when they wander.

"Whiskey? You should be ashamed of yourself." Two more pulls from his cigarette, then it's put out on the edge of the picnic table; a few bright embers, burning, fading, gone. "Yeah. I could. Just one." One beer? Seems unlikely, given his proclivities.

There's that absurd chortling laugh of his. "You do remember me," he says, amused. "C'mon," He picks up the lantern again, leads the way along the path and up the creaking boards. "Never have. And by the time you get out, it's too late to really learn it, innit? The urge to trouble's already in the blood....or it was always there." Joe's philosophical about it.

He grinds his own out on a bollard, but doesn't flick the butt into the ocean. No, it gets vanished into an old tin, doing double duty as a pocket ashtray. "Beggars can't be choosers, and that's all I had until I hit port." No skepticism on the 'just one'. Maybe a modicum of sense has crept in.

It's a little sailboat, her wings neatly furled, riding at her moorings. A sleek white hull, with the name 'Surprise' painted on the bow. Dark in the cabin - he motions for Ruiz to stay on the short stern deck until he's turned on some of the internal lighting. It's all glossy wood and dark blue canvas, the interior, when the lamps are lit. A tiny kitchen, two table and bench arrangements, and the glimpse of a bare bed far forward. Joe gestures towards the bigger table with its surrounding benches, blows out the lantern and hangs it. Then he's rummaging in the fridge and coming out with two local beers, which he sets down on the table.

Warmer by far, there, and he shrugs off the peacoat, leaving only the t-shirt. It's the first time Ruiz has seen the scars. Wrist to elbow on the fair skin of the underside, long pink ridges flanked by stitchmarks. And a newer tattoo to companion the old anchor - something in Russian, in a vivid block print.

The urge to trouble's already in the blood. That makes him smile, though it might be missed what with Joseph's back to him as they climb aboard. His gaze crawls over the sleek little sailboat, nostrils flaring like he wants to know her scent as much as the way she moves. He's distracted; so distracted, his fingers fanned over the railing, his eyes hazy, miles and miles away, that he misses most of what the other man says. And it's only when he realises his old friend is waiting belowdecks, and he's standing there like a fool, that he pushes off to follow.

The soft thump and creak of water tickling her stern mingles with the report of his boots as he moves. It is warmer in here, and Ruiz begins to shrug out of his jacket, too. And pauses at the sight of those scars.

He stares at them long and hard, then ticks his eyes back up again, dark to blue, in silent query. Jacket halfway off his arms, tension stitched through his shoulders.

No shyness, no chagrin. They're glaring things, impossible to miss or conceal. "Yeah," he says, in answer to the unasked question. "I tried to check out the dumb way. I don't know if you followed my career after I went to NASA. The short story is.....I made the astronaut corps. I got two Shuttle missions. And when the Shuttle program was shut down, I got one stay on the station. When my crew was returning, there was a spacecraft malfunction. Capsule and propulsion didn't separate as they shoulda. Which means we made a ballistic landing. No one died, but I got fucked up real bad - I'd been up there for six months, so bone and muscle were very weak."

He fishes a bottle opener out of the drawer, hands it over. "That," he says, deliberately, "Is when I started to...." A circular motion of his free hand gropes for words. "Shine. Glow. See. Whatever you wanna call it, no one's ever given me a consensus on the name. And They showed up and started chewin' on my mind. Body got better but the mind went downhill, until I was so bad off I found a razor blade and climbed into the tub."

A rustle of clothing as he finishes shrugging out of his jacket, tosses it across the back of a chair. His hat follows, tugged off and tossed atop the tiny table, and his fingers scrubbed through dark hair that still bears the imprint of that ball cap, while Joseph answers the question he didn't ask.

When he reaches the part about shining, a slight crease forms between the other man's brows. He takes up a lean against what passes for a kitchen counter, pushes his hands into his pants pockets. Most of his own ink, Joseph will recognise: the roiling waves sprawled up his right arm, and the fishing trawler being tossed at sea. The darkling sugar skull that disappears under the sleeve of his tee, and the sparser ferns along his left arm. His gaze drags from the blue-eyed man's face, all the way down to his hands, and back up again slowly. The bottle opener is accepted, and the cap on one of those beer bottles popped.

"Shit," is all he seems able to provide for a long while. He takes a swig of the drink, dabs his mouth with his knuckles. "How're you doing with it, now? The.. shine. Some people call it a gift." His soft snort might indicate his feelings on that.

Joe pops the cap on the second. "Some better. The capper on that story is that as I got worse and worse and then I slit my wrists.....I ended up in an asylum. One that isn't entirely in this world at all. They let me go, in time. And I'd learned enough to pass for normal - more from the other patients than the staff."

Now it's the full thousand yard stare, pointed roughly in Ruiz's direction, but seeing nothing in particular. A few breaths, and then he recalls himself, blinking back into focus, and looks down, going over to fit himself between bench and table. "Learnin' slow on my own. But it brought me here. Like a kind of compass needle. You're real bright. You always that way, or did it come later for you? It's like...." He rubs at a temple with a fingertip. "I see parts of the spectrum I didn't before."

Mention of the asylum draws Javier's focus from wherever it had wandered off to. The bottle's halfway to his mouth, and he gives the other man a funny look. Like, did you just say what I think you said? The drink's taken, adam's apple working as he swallows. Then, "I know the place. I've been there." Real bright, was he always that way? "Yes and no." It's not much of an answer, but it's what he gives. Then with a breath blown out his nose, he sets the bottle aside, refocuses his attention on Joseph. "Tell me what you can do."

Well, he always was a theatrical bastard. Joe lifts his hand, opens it...and one of the mugs hanging from its hook under the cupboard wings its way over to smack into the palm, swift as a falcon to the gloved fist. All without a flicker. Then he sets it down between them. "That's the simplest and surest thing I can do. There's more. I can walk through the doors, and I can find them to begin with." All delivered with that flatness of affect, the blue stare fixed on the younger man's dark eyes. Not a challenge, or a boast, but he's carefully gauging the reaction as best he can.

There's a subtle flinch when that mug slithers off its hook and whips across the room; the shudder of power that summoned it, palpable. His dark eyes track the thing as it's set down, then slide back up to Joseph's brighter blues. Is he impressed? Bemused? Surprised? Maybe a little of each. De la Vega's flavour of the gift as he's called it, is quite dramatically different. His is the slightest scent of ozone, the acrid tang of a chemical fire, the hot crackle of a circuit waiting to be closed. "It's not bad," is what he supplies after a time, along with a smile that's a bit wolfish, as always. "I'm going to have to introduce you to Rosencrantz." Something about the way he says that name.

"I've met him. First night here, in fact," Joe says, after a long pull on his beer. "New Yorker, gotta little of the old Toidy Toid and Toid accent?" He cocks an eye at Ruiz, thoughtfully. "He's a bright one, too, I remember. This town is thick with 'em, but he stood out." Another beat, as he licks his lips, clearly mulling another question...and discarding it. "How'd you end up here, for that matter?" he settles on, finally. "I haven't seen you since W was still in office."

A shake of his head, in rueful bewilderment. What twists of Fate to land them here, now. "Most of this town is happenin' behind the scenes, innit?"

Itzhak shines like a beacon, like a lighthouse. "Strongest mover I've ever known," Javier opines, when he's a bright one is mentioned. Yeah, definitely something when he talks about the guy, and it's not just his abilities with what some might call telekinesis. It's a whole hell of a lot more than that.

It's a while before he speaks again, mouth closed around the lip of the bottle, and a long slug taken before he swallows, and murmurs in reply, "Left the service, fucked around for a while, showed up for a recruitment drive by the Seattle PD. Decided they weren't so bad." He chuckles, like that's a pretty funny thing. Which it is. Guy like him, all those tattoos and attitude, how the fuck did he wind up a cop? "They ditched me out here, I think hoping I'd get sick of this dump and retire."

It brings a guardedness into the pale eyes, a stillness into those harsh features. Mysticism and other dimensions are perfectly acceptable conversational fodder....but other subjects still warrant avoidance. Or careful tread, at the very least. But Joe bobs his head in a nod.

"There's no...organization to all of this, is there? Memory doesn't want to hold it properly. Are there books of lore? Real teachers?" The mug, as if bored of its current place, goes swooping back to its hook. He barely even glances at it. "I feel like...I'm comin' at it ass-backwards and sidelong. Doin' it the hard way when it should be easier...." His brow furrows. "I wonder if havin' it makes ordinary things easier. I could....one of the things that made me a great pilot was that I could pull Gs like nobody's business. It's a rare thing, but not unheard of...." That self-assessment delivered without a hint of bragging, again. In his mind, it's a simple fact.

The guardedness, the hesitance, they're like layers of an onion. Paper-thin, translucent, but enough of them and they obscure the truth. He lifts the bottle for another swig, and it makes a soft pop as he pulls it away from his mouth, liquid sloshing and settling. "Books? No fucking clue." A flick of his eyes to follow the mug's passage back to its rightful place on the hook, then they shift again to regard the older man. He hears the rest of what's said, but disregards it in favour of, "Tell me what you're thinking, Kavanaugh." One thing Joseph doesn't know about his sometimes frenemy? He's a reader, of no small skill. And it's pretty fucking hard to hide things from him.

"Those things...." He wipes a hand over his mouth, the long line of the jaw. "They have an objective reality. We do things that are reproducible, that affect the physical world. I moved the mug, you saw it. But we don't record, we don't experiment, we don't verify. Each one of us....we're like cavemen having to reinvent the art of starting a fire with each individual. We blunder around. We don't build."

Now the gleam in his eyes is an embryonic fanaticism. "There has to be a way. A way to make it a real science. To deal with those fucking things that come for us, even if they're strong enough to drag us into hallucinations or pocket dimensions or whatever the fuck they are." He raises his hands, curls long fingers, as if the ideas he needed were moths fluttering just out of reach. "Like seabirds sitting on the surface, while the sharks are underneath." Back on to safer ground, if something that sounds like the ravings of a madman can be said to be 'safer ground'.

Javier's never been much of a talker. Never very good with words, though give him a chance and he'll start reciting poetry. The drunker, the more likely. He can be a good listener, though, and he's sat through enough of the guy's harebrained ideas to have perfected that look of you are off your fucking rocker, Cavanaugh. Which, incidentally, is the look he's giving him now. The bottle's tipped back, beer finished off, empty slid onto the counter with a slither of glass on formica.

"Eres un puto cabron loco," he intimates in that scractchy-warm murmur. "You're also a shit liar." He pushes out of his lean, prowls in a bit closer. The man's older, a little greyer, but he's still every inch the dyed in the wool predator he's always been. "The fuck are you afraid of?"

A little huff of scoffing laughter at that. There's somewhat less hostility in that stare than once there was - but then, they're not having this conversation as twentysomethings in a bar in Bahrain, with their respective service brothers urging them on to a fight.

"You want another beer?" he says, first, as he gazes levelly into Ruiz's eyes. "Shit, what ain't I afraid of now? 'fraid of bein' crazy again. Of having Them come for me and turn me inside out. Of bein' back in the Asylum. Met a girl today who was there with me and said that they kept tryin' to get her back. Jesus," He shakes his head, looks down at the wood of the table. "And I am a crazy bastard, but not a whore," he adds, belatedly. "Never made anybody pay for it." Of all the points to get hung up on.

No doubt they've both mellowed out a bit with age. And the war and its trappings are a distant memory now, boxed up and compartmentalized and life goes on. "Yeah. I wouldn't mind another."

The boat creaks, soft, with the motion of the water and the choppy wind trying to lift its sails. "I told you I knew about it. The Asylum." The direct look is met pound for pound; he's never been one to shirk eye contact. Stepping in close to the table, he lingers a moment before sliding in opposite the other man with a soft grunt. Smells like cigarette smoke and leather and cordite, mingled with something citrusy and sharp. "A few of us are going over there soon. Don't know what we'll find, but.." He doesn't follow that train of thought much further, but looks over at the last thing said. "The fuck are you talking about?"

A little closer - the lines more evident, the fine points of blond stubble visible on the jaw. Still whipcord lean - and his scent is tobacco smoke and soap and something clean and subtle and oceanic. Joe levers himself up with fingers splayed on the table, goes to get two more from the fridge. He moves stiffly, as if hip and shoulder joints were giving him trouble"Yeah, I overheard a couple guys talkin' about it the other day. Alexander and....Jules? Somethin' like that? Fuck, I was dumb enough to volunteer to go. I don't know what's there, either....but I gotta go back." That resignation in him, again. Then he glances up from the bottle he's opening, blinking. "Isn't that what you said? I'm a crazy whore bastard? Or were you sayin' it about yourself?"

The stiffness, the way Joseph favours one side slightly, is noted with that rapt attention of his. Like a friend, perhaps, concerned about his buddy.. or a predator looking for signs of weakness in his rival. The name Jules doesn't seem to ring a bell, but Alexander's sure does. "Clayton?" he murmurs, hitching his chin to watch the other man move about the tiny excuse for a kitchen. He waits for another bottle to be handed over, and pops the top if it wasn't done for him. "Yeah, I heard he might be coming along." The last comment garners an amused snort. "Puto cabron loco. Crazy fucking bastard." Javier? Would be a whole lot richer if he'd charged people to fuck him, the amount he got around. And probably still does.

Middle age hasn't thickened him, though he's a little more heavily muscled than the skinny pilot. But the old exuberant grace is nearly entirely gone, and not adequately compensated for by the sheer comfort of someone who knows exactly where his boundaries are. There's an upnod, as he hands off the opened bottles, returns to his seat. "That's the one. He scooted right the fuck on out of the door after I spoke up. S'pose I looked like a wild-eyed maniac, volunteering to go back there."

Then he's eyeing Ruiz across the table, thoughtfully.

Settling in with the bottle of beer, Ruiz briefly eyes the label before taking a swig of its contents. He sits with a slouched shouldered, almost lackadaisical ease. Which belies the fact that no small amount of tension is stitched through his shoulders and spine and into the brutish angle of his jaw. More amusement; his eyes crease at the corners, the sound in his throat is low and warm and yet somehow not particularly friendly. "I think it would take a lot more than the likes of you, to scare him." He tips the beer back, adam's apple traveling up and then down again when he swallows. Clunk of the bottle meeting the tabletop, and his dark eyes are suddenly riveted on blue as the attempt to touch his mind is met with a shudder of power, like smoke sloughed off of glass.

"You want something, you can ask." comes out after a moment or two. He's not smiling.

There and gone, light as the brush of a moth's wing....but palpable. "No doubt," he says, noncommittal. Withdrawing in again, behind that reserve, blue eyes going hooded. "That's your strength, innit? The mental stuff....I can tell."

Not, as was his wont, pressing on with that unyielding need to provoke a reaction. Maybe he's learned to temper the old masochistic impulse to find trouble for trouble's sake.

The mental stuff? "Something like that." Joseph withdraws, but de la Vega can't help his nature; he's a hunter, and the instinct has been seared into him, to doggedly pursue his prey until its brought to ground. He nudges his beer bottle aside with the tips of his inked fingers, like he's getting ready to throw down and doesn't want to spill any of his perfectly good drink. "What do you want?" Never mind that he did some sniffing around of his own, not a few minutes ago. The difference? He didn't get caught.

He's still too new to this. No confidence in it, for all his ease with the physical. The question gets neither glib answer nor knee-jerk denial, but calm consideration. Long fingers curl easily around the bottle, and he takes another pull before answering. "To learn more about all of it. The other world. Them. The powers. The whys and the hows. 's why I'm here, and why I'm not leaving soon."

That tightness around the eyes, and the vagueness in the gaze. Pointed at Ruiz again, but not looking at him, almost purblind. No longer the scientist's conviction that it can be known and quantified and recorded and tamed; the sailor well aware that his sea of questions is going to drown him.

Then there's a little curl of a smile, summoning up what would be a dimple, if his features weren't so harsh. "This gray spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought......to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Ruiz, ever the straight shooting Marine, starts to shift forward somewhere around yearning in desire. He moves like he's going to lean in and impart something conspiratorial, but instead it's his hand thrust in close to take firm hold of the other man's shirt. A fistful of the fabric is taken, and unless Joseph fights him for it, he's hauled in closer with a sharp tug that has muscle sliding and coiling under tanned, inked skin. "You still talk too fucking much." His voice is low and brittle at the edges; his fingers twist in the other man's shirt to try to pull him closer. "I asked a question. I don't give a shit about your philosophical drivel. Why are you fucking with my head?"

It's been ages since he was in any kind of physical conflict, and he was never any great shakes back when. Barfights are about all it is when you do your killing from fifteen thousand feet up. So he's hauled half across the table, not fighting it, only trying to keep some semblance of balance so he doesn't end up belly down on the glossy wood.

But the vulpine glow in the blue eyes is the same as it ever was. Whatever he is, he's not frightened of Ruiz, not even with that hand close to his throat. "I wanted," he says, voice low, gaze not wavering. "To figure out what you intended. What you wanted."

The barfights were plentiful back then. A few beers, a few shots of tequila, and Javier figured he could take on whoever the fuck he pleased. And had has ass handed to him on more than one occasion; not that it learned him any. Once a Marine, always a Marine. "What I intended? What I wanted?" His face is thrust in closer, knuckles dug in against the other man's throat, and his dark eyes are actually closer to slate grey than black. Grey with a hint of green, cleanly reflecting Joseph back in their gleaming surface.

Then he shoves him away, lets him drop back into his seat or tumble out of it as he will. The bottle is left where he put it, and he pushes to his feet abruptly. "You never cared much about that before. So forgive me if I call that for the copout it is."

There's the searching flicker of blue eyes - still trying to divine something, even if he's not resorting to Glimmer for it. Sweat palpable against those knuckles, and the flutter of the pulse. Drop back it is, ending up dumped heavily back into his seat - though he wasn't straining back, so there's no overcompensating. He doesn't whiplash his head back into the bench's top, at least.

"No, I didn't." No hesitation in admitting it. "I do now," he says, quietly, but firmly. "This is your town. Your life. You're dug in here, I'm not. You've got the ability to give me plenty of hell, if you choose to." Now he's in de la Vega's power, in a way he hasn't been for nearly two decades. Only now it isn't career and reputation at stake...but life, perhaps, again. An echo of those old days.

What can be divined is that he's enjoying this, the old dog. He's always enjoyed the hunt, the chase, the smell of sweat on his prey and the sweet tang of adrenaline coursing through his body when he knows he might have pushed something a little too far.

"I'm not as dug in as you think." He snags his jacket, tugs it over his arms, then shrugs it onto his shoulders. "Wasn't born here, still get treated like an outsider more often than not." His ball cap is fetched next, though isn't pulled on yet. "You really think I've got a bone to pick with you, Cavanaugh, don't you?"

"No," he says, simply. "I don't think you've thought of me since the last time you saw me walk out of a bar, until tonight. I don't think you hold a grudge, because that'd mean you care, in a way, and I never mattered to you like that. But I know," he says, "That you like to be master of a situation....and that you like the other people in it to know it. To feel it. That that's a temptation that's very hard for you to resist. And however we've both changed......that sure hasn't for you."

His tone is dry, lacking entendre. No leer on that mobile mouth. But there's hint of the old knowing look, way back behind the blue eyes. How else did he accomplish.....it can't be termed a seduction, even in the loosest terms. Goading someone into something they'd both regret.

Joe takes another long pull. "I can see it. You walk out now, you may forget for a while. Maybe you won't give me another thought. But I doubt it."