2020-11-19 - Fancy Threads

The green haze over Gray Harbor hasn't lifted; it feels so permanent, in fact, that some people have decided -- in their cupcake-fuelled sugar highs -- to just call the city Green Harbor from now on and enjoy it. Others are having a little more trouble adjusting. One of those is Ravn Abildgaard who is enjoying himself and his new-found lack of social inhibitions and anxiety to a point where he's almost acting normal in a crowd -- but also aware, below it all, that when this thing finally does blow over (away), he's going to have to much explaining to do. Not least of all to himself. And possibly to his lawyer.

I went to the woods to shoot guns with the local mobsters. Because why not.

He wanders into the Steelhead Service Center with his violin case under one arm and a nagging feeling that there was something or other he needed to talk to Itzhak Rosencrantz about. Thus is the life of a man who's been perpetually high for a week; small things, unimportant things, they vanish in favour of life's big questions -- such as, did the bastards really eat all the cupcakes while he was passed out under the maple tree he mercilessly gunned down with two different small firearms.

Hey, at least I hit the tree and not, say, Alexander.

The Dane likes this feeling. It began with him decking Seth and Alexander -- very likely by sheer accident -- in the boxing ring and has just gone on since. He's done things he never pictured himself able or brave enough to do. He wants to do more of them. Green Harbor isn't a half bad place to live.

Green Harbor can't even be considered responsible for Ravn finding Itzhak wolfing down dirty rice and refried beans from a tupperware. The man eats like that on the regular. But the perpetual high probably doesn't help.

Itzhak lifts his eyebrows at Ravn when he comes in, swallows. "Mmmf. Hey!" He's shucked his coveralls and washed up for their play date, and his glossy-red violin case rests on the waiting area's coffee table. "So what're you doin' for Thanksgiving?"

"My girlfriend?" Ravn defaults to a snappy answer, surprised. He looks blank -- much in the fashion of someone who isn't American and to whom thanksgiving means something along the lines of oh, right, shops have started making Black Friday a thing because Americans, right. "When is that again?"

"Please, since when do you have a girlfriend?" is Itzhak's snappy rejoinder, "unless wearin' that suit got you one. That was a great suit, you looked hot as hell. Someone give it to you?" That's how he got his suits, after all, the generosity of others. He snaps the top back on the tupperware and swigs from the hard cider standing beading sweat on the sideboard. "It's week after next. You want you should come over?"

"Should I bring anything?" Ravn puts his violin case down on some convenient surface and looks at the other man. The weed is not doing him any favours on the whole keeping a smooth facade issue; it's plain on his face how his mind works. Three questions. Instantly prioritised in terms of potential threat level. Thanksgiving invitation, with its potential of screwing up an unfamiliar custom ranks highest, and thus is addressed first.

Then, defaulting to the least dangerous question, the one that is just a response to a joke. "And sure I got a girlfriend. She's small, black, kind of hairy, and doesn't expect me to take her anywhere expensive before we get in bed. She's also got four feet and tuna breath."

And then, the third issue catches up with him in all of its awkwardness, elbowing thanksgiving in the face. Ravn glances at the other man for just that tell-tale second too long and murmurs, "I had a few things sent over from home. I mean, now that I'm staying long enough anywhere to have shelves. Swing, you said?"

Straws in wells.

Itzhak squints at Ravn. Even he can tell that Ravn is thinking about how to answer, and he didn't think he asked anything so complicated. But he snorts over the joke, anyway. "Swing, I says." He pops into the head to wash his hands--always washing his hands when he's around a violin or at work, this guy--and goes to flip the latches on his case when he comes out. Belatedly, something Ravn said, or more specifically the way he said it, catches up with him and he looks up. And he just looks at him, frowning, trying to get his thoughts in order enough to tackle whatever's pinging at him, hands gone still hovering over his new violin.

"It was a dare," Ravn murmurs. "Seth did the kilt, I did the suit. I regretted it the moment I turned up."

"Yyyyeah," Itzhak says, drawing it out thoughtfully. "Was obvious ya did. Well, you looked gorgeous, for what it's worth." Something is off. He can tell something's off. "Uh, listen, you okay?"

That's not exactly what he wants to say, but it's a start.

"I went to have a long talk with Kelly's mum who is remarkably nice for a dead person," Ravn replies and doesn't at all relax. "I don't feel comfortable dressed like that. It's not that I don't know how to walk and sit in a suit, but I was fucking high and I wanted to see if Seth really would turn up in a kilt. Which he did. And knowing him, he wasn't joking about going commando under it either, or about wearing a blue ribbon in case anyone wanted to see if the old joke is true."

He sighs lightly. "This is so fucking awkward. I'm either too high or not high enough. There's no way I can't come across as a condescending prick in this scenario, is there?"

"Oh I just bet he wasn't," Itzhak says, amused for a moment. "Don't think I didn't think about checking. Those legs he's got on him, damn!" But he'd been called away before he got the chance.

He leaves his violin for the moment and comes close to Ravn. Not too close, aware of the other man's disability, which echoes his own in some ways, but close enough to make it clear he's serious. "Hey. What's going on? Talk to me." His gray-green-amber hazel eyes hazard eye contact and search Ravn's for an answer.

"Nothing's going on." Ravn shakes his head. "Except me feeling like an asshole for some reason I'm not even sure about. I have clothes like that. For when I decide to go see some fancy art thing in Seattle where you have to dress the part. Or the Eighty-Eight. And for some stupid reason I feel like I've lied to you about it which is ridiculous since it's never come up in conversation. It's the whole -- it's a cultural thing. Someone even wrote a book about it, set the rules down on paper -- the Law of Jante. It goes something like, don't think you're something, don't think you're better than us, don't act like you're better than us, fall in line, don't stand out. Danish people don't show off unless we really want to prove we're that much better than you."

Itzhak listens, eyebrows tipping up, looking more and more dubious and unconvinced. "Okay. C'mere." He beckons Ravn to follow him to the sitting area, and waves him to an armchair. "Siddown. We're gonna do a thing. Can I touch you?"

Ravn flops himself down as instructed and frowns. "I suppose? What are you going to do?" There is a guardedness there which is not directed at the other man personally as much as it is directed at the whole being touched thing as a matter of principle. He can endure it, he can even like it, but he needs to watch it like he was herding hyperactive cats.

Itzhak sits, too, across from Ravn, looking at him with his eyebrows very serious. He offers his hand; broad calloused palm, long clever fingers. He doesn't touch Ravn, but rather lets him reach out to him. "I can't fucking make words right with this shit. I wanna talk to you in ya mind."

Ravn studies the hand a moment, then slowly pulls his own glove off and reaches out. He's got very well manicured, slender hands with long fingers -- probably not a surprise to anyone and least of all Itzhak who has seen him remove that right glove before, to work his violin frets. Carefully he lets those fingertips come to rest on the other man's palm. There is nothing sensual about the gesture for all the appearance of it; these are the movements of a man who half expects to feel like the other man's hand is electrified.

It isn't, though. "Do I need to do anything?"

Itzhak doesn't close his fingers around Ravn's. He just lets them rest on his palm, the way he might treat a butterfly if one was to land there and rest, fanning its glorious wings. His expression is still serious, but tender, somehow, too. This is a risk for Ravn, and he knows it.

"Nothin'," he says, his gravelly voice gentle. "Just...let me in."

Violin music sings in Ravn's head, and it's obvious, can't be anything else: that is Itzhak. The man's bigger-than-life presence, his complicated personality, his wild heart and his cranky, passionate soul are all encoded into those notes. As if a feather brushes against some part of Ravn that has no physical analogue, it feels, this asking for connection.

A feather brushing across the mental equivalent of miles and miles of steep, unsurmountable walls. This is a mind castle built to fend off invasion -- any kind of invasion. Like the man himself, layers upon layers of misdirection, defences, ripostes, dodges, and -- cracks. Four months ago, Ravn had his walls up to a point of perfection where no one touched him and he touched no one; where he existed in solitude in a world full of people, never connecting. Transient.

Four months in Gray Harbor have worn holes in the steel plating, and the last week's cannabis-based onslaught has not helped. There are cracks and openings, and behind them, someone who tries to reach out but has no experience whatsoever with this kind of contact. A strange kind of vulnerability, wrapped in surprising amounts of frustation and anger that he does indeed not understand. Ravn is very much the kind of man who analyses, studies, learns, and understands how things work. Except that this?

This is new, and he does not understand it. He must trust the New Yorker a fair bit; he's still there.

Like a seeking vine, Itzhak's music searches along that armor. He couldn't force his way in, that becomes quickly obvious. It just doesn't work like that. He can only request. Ravn's attempt at reaching out seems more than good enough; Itzhak catches him and then--

then he's just there. A curl of thought expresses itself as a fractal spiral, a tendril-arm made of music and mathematics. Like the very tip of an octopus's tentacle, infinitely flexible, extremely slim. Ravn's trust is rewarded with Itzhak taking great care in his mind.

<<I could do more than this. But I won't, if you're not ready.>> In the shared mindspace, Itzhak's 'voice' is a violin.

I don't understand what's happening, is what Ravn tries to say. What he probably says is more along the lines of meow.

Nothing more pampered and prissy in this universe than a well groomed Siamese cat. One of those with a neat little collar with a bell on, and its own fancy silk pillow. A Disney villain level of spoiled, I-have-my-own-personal-groomer of feline. Who is looking at the tendril with a stare of confusion and mild panic, eyes a very familiar shade of blue-grey. Ravn's mental self-image is really not very flattering insofar that it's a very pretty cat. And probably one that would die if ever subjected to something as real and gritty and terrifying as a live mouse.

It's the kind of cat that only eats pedigree tuna.

Whatever Itzhak thought Ravn might manifest as, well, this isn't it. The fractal fern-arm of his mind coils in on itself, like a sensitive plant, surprised and kind of amused and a little... worried? suspicious? a little something. The sight of his friend as a pampered, highly bred, beautifully groomed cat is unexpected.

<<s'just me,>> his violin murmurs, low and sweet. <<Ain't nothin' to be afraid of. Nobody really understands how this works. I can't hurt you. It just kinda...is. Sometimes people look like animals, or other stuff.>> Like a crooning lullaby, one in Yiddish, no doubt.

Not one hair is out of place on this cat. It probably has someone come by regularly with a brush to make it so. It looks down at itself as if on some level it is every bit as surprised at finding itself to be, indeed, a cat as Itzhak is to see one. <<I'm... a cat.>>

A second pause.

<<I'm my mother's Siamese.>>

Well, that's not telling at all there, Abildgaard.

Itzhak considers this. Really, like considers it. Violin music swells as if from a far-off orchestra. There's the strong sense that outside Ravn's borders is whatever Itzhak truly is, instead of just this tiniest slimmest representation of himself.

<<Could you be something else if you wanted?>> He sounds curious, hesitant. He initiated this contact for a purpose, but like often seems to happen around Ravn, he becomes more interested in something else instead.

The Siamese looks down at its paws. They are dainty little paws and with their colour points, it looks like he has little mitts on. So adorbs. So -- not very I'm a grown man of thirty.

<<I... don't know? I suppose this is what I am, is it? On the inside?>>

He doesn't sound very impressed with himself. But also kind of resigned; for what it's worth, it may be exactly how he sees himself. Look at his little collar, it has a bell on.

<<Shit, hell if I know.>> There's a ripple of bemusement, fractals iterating, a sense like musical thunder 'outside'. Itzhak is thinking. <<Don't know if it's "really" you anymore'n I'm "really" a unicorn.>> He offers an image to Ravn: a tall, leggy, gracile creature, with a coat as glossy jet black as Itzhak's curls, dappled in white like a fawn. Not a deer, or a horse, something that bears a family resemblance to both but is its own creature. The horn is long, the hooves are cloven. Something fierce and swift and pure. Itzhak might be fierce, might even be swift, but pure? Hah, don't make me laugh.

It's just an image, though, a memory. The unicorn itself hasn't manifested.

<<I am apparently my mother's cat. My therapist back home would be howling with laughter if she could see me now. Or very smugly doing the 'I told you so' dance around her desk.>>

Ravn's mental voice is nothing if not wry. He's not even surprised anymore. Because of course he is his mother's cat. That's all he's ever been, on some level.

He sits up. The little bell tinkles. He swats at it. It tinkles again.

<<It's appropriate, I suppose.>>

The unicorn at least gives the cat pause. A pampered, prissy Siamese is still a real animal. You can see one in the waking world (whether you want to is another question). Black, white-dappled unicorns that ooze wild, untamed sensuality, on the other hand, are not something you encounter in Central Park any given Friday afternoon.

<<Wow.>>

<<One time, I got turned into that. In a Dream. And...I dunno, it kinda stuck.>> Itzhak sounds a little embarrassed by Ravn's being wowed. The contrast between his unicorn--a memory of rearing, screaming a stallion's challenge, hooves slashing, refusing to budge, you won't get past me!--and this pampered, fragile creature is strong. He can 'hear' perfectly well the thought that Ravn regards this revelation as that's all he's ever been.

His mother's cosseted pet.

Itzhak doesn't believe it, and that too is obvious. Ravn, nothing more than an exquisite creature that's been so domesticated it no longer stands a chance of survival in anything resembling its native environment? That's not who Itzhak knows. That's not who he thinks Ravn is.

He's never known anybody else to have a mental image of themselves so at odds with who Itzhak thought they were.

The Siamese sits on its delicate rump, curling its tail around its prissy little mitten paws.

<<Here's to hoping this doesn't stick. Because I don't think I can spend this many hours a day grooming myself and not go insane. Of course, that'd explain a lot about my mother's cat. He ate every potted plant in the house. I slipped him weed sometimes, he seemed to appreciate it.>>

Kitty sighs.

<<Well, this is me. This is who I am, when I'm not pretending to be someone I'm not, I guess.>>

<<Maybe.>> Itzhak's violin sounds dubious. <<Maybe, but that cat wouldn't hitchhike across America, I'm just saying. At some point you're the person you pretend to be. Ask me how I know.>>

But this very difficulty, this confusion between who Itzhak thinks Ravn is and who Ravn thinks Ravn is, gets at the core of what he couldn't find words to express. He lets that feeling float to the surface like great clumps of kelp torn from their roots by a storm.

Ravn, at Sitka, wearing a gorgeous suit and commanding waitstaff with the faintest flicker of a glance. Ravn, scraping barnacles off his boat. Ravn, playing his violin (catgut strings, hardly nobody uses those here, they're fragile and cost a fuckin' fortune) with highly-trained beauty and skill. Ravn, clearing tables at the Twofer, wiping down the bar, carrying tubs of used glasses. Ravn, in that other suit at Joey Kelly's munchies bash, carrying himself like a man of consequence, when he's not hiding in the kitchen with a ghost for company.

<<I know how to wear a suit. Doesn't mean I like to wear one,>> the cat points out.

Beat.

<<And I think I might stop using catgut strings. All things considered.>>

At least his wry sense of humour is intact?

The Siamese keeps looking at the violin-presence inasmuch as a cat can look at a concept (or a king) with large, blue-grey eyes. <<This is why I don't say anything. This is not who I am. Or it is, but it's not who I want to be.>>

Ravn isn't who he's pretended to be. Some kind of massive engine turns over 'outside', gears slotting into place, a four-dimensional puzzle coming together--and Itzhak drops the connection out of shock.

He stands up, fast, real fast, Ravn's fingers sliding from his palm. And oh boy, he looks pissed. Turns out Itzhak, when pissed, is actually kinda terrifying, his face twisted into a scowl, his gray eyes gone hot and furious.

"You better fuckin' explain yourself right the fuck now, Abildgaard."

Maybe that image, the over-polished cat, is not entirely off the mark after all. The pampered, soft, and spoiled part? Not evident at the moment in the tall man sitting there calmly pulling his glove back on. But the hard, glossy perfection? The posture, bred into him by generations upon generations of ancestors whom he can probably name. The distance between the two men may be just an arm's length in physical space, but from the leaden colour of Ravn's eyes that moment, it is eight hundred and fifty years wide.

"My first named ancestor was steward to King Valdemar II the Victorious, put on record in 1230. Is that what you want to hear? That I have a pedigree?"

Ravn sighs lightly and shakes his head, a lock of copper blond falling into his face. Then he stands up as well. Much as Rosencrantz is by far the more intimidating man of the two, Ravn is two inches taller, and the other man's scowl meets with perfect composure and a gaze the colour of the stainless steel his mental facades feel like. "I don't talk about my life. This is why."

"So you just fuckin' lie to everybody? You lie to me?" Itzhak's voice, at high volume, comes dangerously close to breaking; his lanky body is wound up like a violin string turned too far. It's that telltale wobble in his tone that gives him away.

He's hurt. He's betrayed. Itzhak Rosencrantz is wounded. Ravn retreats into that impenetrable, glossy shell? Itzhak starts yelling at the top of his singer's lungs, he gets furious, he gets threatening. Not a graceful display in the least, no showman's flair here, no wild fierce creature. Just a flawed man, yelling at his friend because he's hurt by him.

"I didn't lie to anybody." The other man's tone is calm, perfectly so. It carries no trace of any emotion. "There are things I don't talk about. I do not lie."

He looks down a moment, and that at least, is a bit of a crack in his composure. Ravn is, by his own admission, a confidence artist. He knows that the line between lying outright and lying by omission is hair thin. Tell a whopper or allow others to make one up themselves in order to fill in the blanks, it amounts to the same thing: Misdirection. Clinging to a principle of not directly lying doesn't change the fact that people are mislead. He doesn't like to admit it, but he does know it.

The Dane glances at the door. Walking out, leaving -- it's certainly the easier choice, and for most of his life, it's certainly been his preferred choice.

If I leave now, I might as well go home, pack up my cat and get on that Greyhound to Portland.

And that's exactly what he's going to do -- because that is how Ravn Abildgaard deals with emotional turbulence: Running away, moving on, getting out. Except this week Gray Harbor is Green Harbor, the weed permeates every fibre in his brain and he's made friends here, one of which are currently screaming at him, and he can't, he can't just turn his back and awalk away.

Not again.

Ravn looks back at Itzhak. Waiting for him to pause for breath, perhaps. And when he does, the Dane says, "I am exactly who I told you I was -- a drifter, a backpacker, a hustler. An academic with a Ph.D, who got the hell out of academics before somebody decided he should be a professor next. The guy who cleans pissoirs at the Twofer."

Every word is carefully measured, the modulation that of someone who's very likely to have had actual lessons in public speaking, in an attempt to overcome social anxieties. "And before I was that, I was a rich, privileged Danish kid whom you punched in the nose in a dream. I left that life behind in Denmark. Everything I am, is what you've seen."

"THAT'S LYING!"

Turns out Itzhak can get louder. Also turns out he's not about to fall for the confidence-artist thing. A furious Rosencrantz will happily trample that very delicate line into the mud.

The way he's glaring at Ravn right now is uncannily like the way his teenage Dream-self glared at him right before he stepped up to pop him in the nose. But grown, real Itzhak doesn't do that. Instead he quarter-turns away, red in the face, one big hand coming up to cover his eyes.

"I thought you were like me," he says, at a more normal volume, his voice thickening. Is he...is he going to cry? Is he already crying?

"That is not lying. It's misdirection." Ravn's tone is adamant; this is a truth of which there is no denial. A fact that can be debated no more than the law of gravity or the tide. "I am exactly what I look like. A guy who lives in a trailer park and cleans tables to pay his rent. The guy you say backpacked across Europe and America? That's me. That's who I am. Stupidly bad at human connections, running away from things he can't handle, runs to hide in people's kitchen with their family ghosts because he's terrified of more than three people looking at him at once -- that's me."

Ravn takes a deep breath, trying to keep his voice in that calm, controlled pitch and not entirely succeeding. "The guy who'd rather let everyone think he's a helpless amateur on his instrument than have them watch him play. The guy who pretends he has no idea women are trying to chat him up because he can't cope with inevitable rejection. That's me, too. The guy who runs away from conflict so fast that for three years I never stayed in one place long enough for anyone to learn my name or ask where I came from. That's me."

He raises his hands as if for a moment he's the one contemplating punching the other man in the face. Then he makes an exasperated gesture and turns away in the fashion of someone who is so very much done with whatever it is he's done with. "What would you have me do? Where do you think I'd be if I walked into town announcing myself Count fucking la di dah, come take a selfie with me? All I want is to be left the hell alone, earn my own way, and prove that I have some kind of worth!"

Itzhak looks at Ravn with one eye between the spread webbing of forefinger and thumb, and he is crying. Silently, only a few hitches of his big bony ribcage to give him away, but crying nonetheless. He doesn't interrupt, doesn't do or say a damn thing while Ravn starts slow and winds up like a runaway train, screaming and smoking down the tracks.

But then Ravn says Count fucking la di dah and he coughs, snorts wetly, and starts laughing. Fumbling in his back pocket, he digs out a neatly folded handkerchief and presses it over his face and just laughs, more than a little wildly.

Wiping his face, he says, hiccuping and uneven, "Jesus Christ. It's about goddamn time you got mad about something."

"I get mad all the time," Ravn says, not turning around. "But I'm not usually high for a week. Usually I can just... bottle it up."

He takes a few deep breaths, perhaps to steady himself. "I don't mean to misdirect out of spite or ill intent, Itzhak. I just want to leave it all where it belongs -- on the other side of the Atlantic. I had to have this conversation with Vyvyan Vydal and Hyacinth Addington as well -- Hyacinth wanted to save me. I had to remind her just how crazy Americans are about this kind of thing. This country falls on its arse for old world fancy like it never fought a revolutionary war to get rid of that whole thing."

Itzhak snorts again, wry this time. "Guess I shouldn't be surprised those two clocked ya, while the ex-con from the Lower East Side was fuckin' clueless." He mops up some, wiping his eyes and nose, muttering into the hanky (it's dark blue paisley), "Yeah, we're kinda stupid like that." The hanky gets stuffed into his pocket again and he looks at Ravn--well, Ravn's back--red-eyed and red-nosed.

"Look," he says, hesitant, and he looks away again. "'m sorry for yelling at you. I never thought you were nothing except another guy down on his luck. I guess I don't get why you wanna clean bathrooms at the Twofer if you don't have to, but..." trailing off, he rubs at his knuckles, anxious. "You wanna prove something," he murmurs. "That, I get."

"Because that's why." Ravn nods and relaxes slightly; loses some of that tension that might have sent him bolting out a window or leaving a Dane-shaped hole in a nearby wall. "Proving something. Doing something that's mine. Having something that I made, instead of inheriting it. Finding out who I am."

He sighs and turns around at last. "I haven't found out. But I have found out, at least, that the guy who cleans tables for a living is a lot more me. Look, I'm not going to tell you that old cliché that money can't buy happiness, Itzhak. Money solves a hell of a lot of problems. But it was never my money, my life, my choices. You made a choice to be more than a jailbird from New York. You got out. You made yourself into something else. I did the same. We are the same."

"Yeah well you better fuckin' not tell me that if you don't wanna get yelled at again." Itzhak's tone regains a hint of its usual sardonic lilt. "I know just how many problems money solves. Almost as many as having no money causes." A long pause, while he studies Ravn, his long expressive face unhappy, and oh how he can emote that. What Ravn can communicate with his body language, Itzhak relies on his eyebrows to say.

"That's why you're ya ma's cat." Not a question. Itzhak lofts those talkative eyebrows.

Ravn looks at the other man, that coppery gold lock falling into his face again as if it's trying to shield him from having to look Itzhak properly in the eyes. Then he nods. "A pampered and neurotic little shit who died from eating her peace lilies. Most useless creature on the planet, that cat. I guess that's how I see myself too. Even if I don't eat potted plants."

Then he glances at the door. "This week... This weed thing. This cloud. I keep finding myself thinking and talking like the hustler I've been living as. Swearing like a sailor and doing reckless things for shit and giggles. Taking chances, doing things I wouldn't do otherwise. I punched fucking Seth Monaghan in the nose -- I'm not an idiot, Itzhak, I can do the math as to what that guy does for a living and why he carries a piece on him at all times. I've said things, done things. It's like having built a giant house of cards and then suddenly, there's a draft -- and you see it coming down around you."

"Said things, done things, he says, like saying things and doing things is a problem. It's only a problem when you're tryin' to hide." Itzhak has been standing there like he doesn't know what to do with himself. Now he moves on his rolling half-saunter to his violin case, opens it up, gets Rimon out to cradle her in his arms. "A guy like Seth Monaghan only gets his nose broke by a guy like you if he let you do it, he had it comin'," he mutters, thumb stroking the four strings, bending his curly dark head over the instrument. "Musta thought you didn't have it in you. I coulda told him you do."

Weed rambling. Itzhak gets back on track. "You ever think you are the kind of guy who takes chances? Who punches some big tough guy in the schnozz? The kind of guy who says things and does things?" He glances up, softly plucking chords, mandolin-style.

Ravn looks on, his sharp features revealing puzzlement. Of all the reactions to this situation that he may have played out in his head at some point, this one was not on the list. But as reactions go, it's at least not the one where he got another fist to the face.

"No." He looks at the chair that he vacated when the other man got up and started to yell. He thinks about it. He tries to collect his thoughts; with the adrenaline fading, the cannabis cloud is reasserting its influence and his mind feels fuzzy. "I mean, yes. I take chances. I've been run out of town with the Romas and the vagrants several times. Busted on bullshit charges. Not so bullshit charges. But, I'm not the kind of guy who really... says things, no."

Itzhak stops strumming. "Yes. You are."

The self-proclaimed Count fucking la di dah flops down on the chair bonelessly. "I talk a lot but I don't say a lot. Like a fucking Siamese. They never shut up, either."

What his blue-grey eyes are saying, though, is, Are we good? Please say that we are good.

Itzhak's gray-green eyes flick up from the violin in his hands. He meets Ravn's eyes steadily, for a moment. We're good--but this is not the end of this conversation, is what that looks says.

What he says with that unique voice of his is, "Are you really a count? What the fuck is a count?"

Ravn exhales a sigh of relief. "It's a noble title. Ranks below royalty, above gentry. A relic of history that means I can put a fancy picture of a shield on my stationery if I should feel like being an intolerable asshole. And that at least some people go bananas at me because they think I'm fucking Prince Harry." He pauses. "Who walked out on the whole damn thing anyway, not that I blame him."

He looks back at the New Yorker, remembering something. "You're friends with Dante Taylor. There's not a lot of difference between him and me except I get to put a word in front of my name if I want to, and he doesn't. Same deal otherwise. Inbred Europeans with a lot of family history. Except Taylor went and made something out of himself as a writer, which I admire."

"Listen, buddy, I'm a Levi. My line goes back to Moses. You ain't the only one in the room with a lot of family history." Itzhak hikes one eyebrow, all the irony in his crabby Jewish soul packed into that one minute gesture. "Also as a New Yorker I'm obligated not to be impressed by anybody and some scrawny hustler ain't gonna cross my eyes."

But. That's lurking in those eyes he isn't crossing. That 'but'. We're tabling this shit for now, but I'll be coming back to it when I'm ready.

And he will be ready. At some point not now. Now he's got to retreat and lick his wounds, probably text up a storm to August Roen, definitely have another cry or two in the arms of Javier de la Vega.

But he will be.

There's a time for every discussion, Ravn cedes in his mind. And the right time for this one probably isn't when the air is so full of weed that neither man can see or think straight. Stupid decisions are made at a time like that. Emotional decisions, choices that have not been thought through.

Or maybe, with a bit of luck, this whole day will be written off as a wild weed fantasy with no basis in reality. A man can only hope.