(no subject)
Unusually, Sabretooth is not the first person to the warehouse tonight. Instead, he is at least ten minutes late past the usual time. This means that, while the warehouse is accessable (thanks to his making copies of the keys), there is nothing set up yet. No beer or water. Instead, it was simply big and dark and empty until someone else took the initiative to deal with that.
Polaris knows her way around enough to turn on the lights, at least, but she hasn't gone any farther than that, instead waiting around to see who else might turn up, thumbs hooked in her jeans pockets. Her green hair, cap tossed aside the moment she arrived, does not look /precisely/ mussed, but she has an air of smugness that points to someone having had quality time with an SO before she set off.
As others gather, Bahir remains at a remove. Neither first nor last to arrive, he stands back against the wall and watches the various entrances with an expression of growing frustration. Arms folded across his chest, he leans. And he waits. A small package wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine sits on a stack of boxes near his elbow.
Among the last of the little group to turn up, Ellen slips in quietly, unzipping her dark sweatshirt and shrugging away from her hood to cast it aside. The absence of beer and water earns a slight frown from her as she surveys the assembled, and she stands with slight diffidence, social awkwardness in full force as her gaze tips from one of these people she knows to another. Quuiiiiieeeeet.
Creed's entrance is sudden and with no fanfare. He pushes his way in through the door. He pulls his coat off the moment he is inside and tosses it onto the floor with a loud whump. He looks around between the group that has emerged. "Well," he says. "Who's first?"
Bahir! Oh, oh, Bahir! He's first! "/Asshole/." He snatches up his package, thumbing twine up and off the paper wrapping.
Polaris had started rolling her shoulders, limbering up, but she stops in the middle of opening her mouth when Bahir pipes up. "Happy to wait," she murmurs on a laugh. She frowns at the package, but since it has no metal, she doesn't look illuminated.
Ellen blinks owlishly in Bahir's direction, closing her mouth rather than saying whatever she had opened it to say, and folding her hands.
Dark eyes turn to Bahir at his little outburst. Creed looks at him nostrils flaring at the sight of that package. It doesn't seem to smell like gun powder, so he isn't going to be inconvenienced with any more wounds this week. "Am I?" he asks, almost amused.
Wings of brown paper unfold: Bahir lifts the package and hurls it in Creed's direction. The air grabs at paper, ripping it off in a crinkling flap so that the slab of meat beneath flies unhindered. Several hand-lengths long, bigger than his fist at the base -- it's a big, still-bloody chunk of meat. Is it Creedy's /birthday/?
"What is that, dinner?" Lori asks, jumping to the first logical conclusion when confronted by a chunk of meat. Though why it should be thrown is still beyond her. She idly takes some metal worry balls out of her pocket and starts playing with them.
Shaking her head, Ellen drifts towards the green-haired woman with an idle, awkward sort of casualness. "I do not understand," she tells her gravely, since Lori doesn't seem to either.
The big hunk of meet hits Creed's face with a big meaty slap. It is a pretty horrible sound, really. His immediate reaction is for one hand, clothed in his typical fingerless gloves, to snatch it as it falls down his chest and yank it away from him. He also lets out a roar of rage at being hit with something. Only then does he look down at it. "What the /fuck/ do you think you're doing?"
It is a tongue. It is a bigger tongue than Creed gave Bahir, but then, Creed is a bigger man than Bahir. Fists balled at his sides, Bahir glares. "I didn't invite you over for fucking melon. What the fuck were /you/ doing?" No time for ladiez.
"Could be a guy thing," Lori suggests helpfully in an undervoice to Ellen. "I guess they started an argument sometime outside of this."
"Raw meat projectiles," Ellen replies, faintly nettled. This is not an example of male behavior with which she is familiar.
Whatever reaction Bahir had been expecting out of Creed, it is probably not the man standing there with the big cow tongue held in his fist, staring at it and laughing. It isn't some menacing, 'I'm gonna kill you' laugh. It is genuine, honest to god laughter. Sabretooth finds this, and Bahir, hilarious.
Bahir FUMES. If one looks closely, one could almost see the steam coming out of his ears. "That desperate to get shot? That desperate to go base jumping without a parachute?" he snaps, with a distinct 'STOP LAUGHING AT ME I AM BEING MAD HERE' huffiness.
Polaris crosses her arms, as if considering some performance art piece and trying to decode it. "Well, if this was one of those crappy slapstick commedies, the argument we didn't see would have been about dinner at a steak restaurant or something. So the meat is related to the argument, not to anything else." She snerks. Meat. Hur hur.
Ellen ... mostly looks blank. "I am not sure what you mean," she says to Lori, her solemnity almost apologetic. She returns her glance to the definite lack of buddy comedy going on across the warehouse.
Creed's laughter is not even as ugly as it usually is. He stands up straight and walks over to the fuming Bahir. His hand not holding the tongue reaches out to try to slap the smaller man on the shoulder. "That's fucking amazing," he says, laughing again. "Holy shit. See? I knew you'd get it. I fucking knew you had it in you." Turning his back on Bahir, he seems to be in easily the best mood any of the assembled have ever seen. "Polaris? Ellen? See that shit? Bahir /gets/ it."
"He gets -- ... meat?" Ellen does not get it.
If Bahir were a tea kettle, ears would be ringing ... but he isn't, so they aren't. Lacking that outlet, when Creed comes in to pat his shoulders, he instead chooses to snap a sharp jab at his jaw, sliding to the side with sharp, shearing kick at his knee. He gets -- ...angry! "Stop /fucking/ laughing."
Polaris is chuckling now too. "Meat's pretty--" She has to master herself before she gets the delivery right. "Pretty funny, Bahir."
Crack. Crunch. Bahir hits pretty hard. Creed staggers back a step and stretches his jaw a couple of times, making it crack. "You heard the girls, al-Razi. Meat's fucking funny." His own jabs come at Bahir, swings meant to keep him at a distance instead of do damage. "Did it really piss you off so bad you had to send your nanny to yell at me? Shit, I think what you just did was the best fuckin' thing I could have imagined."
Ellen still mostly looks lost, but at least there's hitting now. She watches with slightly less confusion reflected in her expression. That's what this whole party is about, right? Hitting!
Bahir's voice is a hissy spit of crank: "Don't have a fucking nanny you cocksucker." Pissed, he fails to heed the warning of swings meant for distance, absorbing what blows he must to land another hit of his own: a knee to Creed's groin. He is not fighting nicely. He then retreats, falling back and circling. When he glances in Polaris's direction, it is only to make a crude gesture. "I'm sure you're an expert in meat when it comes as curtains."
Polaris chokes a little, just from the unexpectedness of not just being ignored on the sidelines. She grins. "Jack of all trades, me. Munch rug, /and/ I've probably sucked as much dick as you have."
"I don't think meat would be an effective material for curtains." Ellen looks around at the walls. The warehouse lacks appropriate windowage for mental image comparison. Then she looks at Polaris, perhaps seeking enlightenment. She sort of finds it. "Oh," she says, her brow knitting. "I see." Frown deepening, she subsides, taking half a step back, and then another half step, to claim one of the wooden crates that litters the warehouse for a seat.
"You're calling /me/ the cocksucker, when your boyfriend just limp-wristed all over me for tonguing your shoe?" Creed is busy making horrible comment when he takes that knee to the crotch. He doubles over, only to have the back and forth about meat-curtains and dick-sucking, stacked with Ellen's statement destroy him. Sabretooth, the feared mutant terrorist, the monster and slayer in the night, collapses onto his side on the floor of the warehouse and laughs his ass off.
As long as Creed is on his side on the floor, Bahir will kick him in the face. Anger bleeds into rage as Creed rofls. "What the /fuck/ are you talking about?" No more snappy comebacks in Polaris's direction: Bahir is nearly shaking with the urge to do Creed serious bodily harm. (Too bad about that healing factor, eh?) Telepathy strains at its leash.
"You won't have met my girlfriend," Lori says to Ellen, as a vague bit of extra explanation if she happens to still need it. She drifts along with to stay in conversational distance, though doesn't sit down herself. Her metal balls circle around her slowly in idle patterns. "I guess we showed up to stand-up night at the club tonight."
Ellen looks slightly uncomfortable with this information, in as much as she looks comfortable with anything, which is not much. Her hands folded together over her knees, she cants her head, and lifts a shoulder in a partial shrug. "I do not understand the humor."
You know what isn't as funny as meat-curtains? Choking on two of your own teeth. Creed rolls onto his front, spitting blood and gagging after being kicked so firmly in the face. He isn't laughing anymore. Instead, he roars up from the floor already in a run so that he can lunge at Bahir and tackle him to the floor of the warehouse. There are a lot of punches that rain down to follow.
Spiraling rage blunts as laughter cuts, but Bahir doesn't quite have time to process that 'Creed has stopped laughing' also equals 'and is now going to kick my ass'. He hits the floor hard, but with a squirm and a writhe to try to get away, out of the range of easy punches. Since they will grow back, he makes targets of Creed's eyes. They've had a rough week.
Polaris finds herself a seat, finally. She seems happy enough with spectating, whatever impulses to roughness she had actually more purged by activities beforehand. "I'm not sure I could explain it to you," she tells Ellen, and then settles in to watch with interest.
Ellen watches the scuffle with the alert interest of someone who half expects to have to clean up the mess afterwards. "It is probably best not to make the attempt," she replies to Lori with a hint of dry humor layered into her low, bland tone.
Creed's eyes will grow back. Bahir is going to be stuck with Creed's choice of target for a couple of days. Both clawed hands smash down against the smaller man's shoulders so that Victor can more effectively drive his knee up and into his testicles. Three of those should do. That is a gift to Percy as much as Bahir. Creed relents though, and lurches up to his feet to let Bahir breathe.
Usually more toward the golden end of olive skin tones, Bahir looks more ... green. The fight quite goes out of him as agony takes over. He either kicks at Creed's ankle, or twitches. Ow.
Many women, seeing something like that happen, will cross their legs out of a sympathetic instinct to protect what they do not have. Ellen Dramstadt merely frowns.
The housekeeper arrives to cart Polaris off to bed.
Holding at his bloodied eyes and bleeding from between his lips, Creed steps back and away from Bahir to make it clear that the fight is over. "Fuck. You kicked my teeth in," she tells the smaller man in a rumble. "And in case you didn't figure it out, the tongue was a fucking joke. I thought after all of the nights like this, you'd understand I don't want to /fuck with you/. I wanted to /laugh with you./"
Yeah, yeah. Bahir will appreciate all that in a few. Just ... give him ... a while. /Three of those/.
"It would appear as though the comedy portion of the evening has ended," Ellen murmurs, watching Bahir wallowing in agony with a slightly blank look. Is there a point she's supposed to get up and help? Usually people ask! Or fall unconscious. That's a good cue.
Creed paces off to a darker corner of the warehouse. Regrowing teeth is really not the nicest of sensations. He can be seen pacing back and forth, holding his face off and on. In spite of his bizarrely high pain thresholds, something about tonight caught him off guard. Maybe it was the fact that he was off guard.
Bahir does neither. He just kind of curls on his side a little bit, and then sits up, and then makes no further movements. Once he is able to concentrate again, he drops Creed with a telepathic jab.
Whathump. Sabretooth rug.
Rising with a slight shake of her head, Ellen gives Bahir a look of reproof. She pads on silent feet to the fallen murderer to check the progress of his healing factor; but finding it continuing in the relative peace of unconsciousness, she turns back to the telepath, moving easily across the floor. She kneels at his side and offers him her left hand, palm up, in silence.
Picking up a metaphorical needle and telepathic thread, Bahir slips over to embroider a message on the Sabretooth rug. He slides into his unconscious mind, all set to stamp his mark -- only to find other marks already /rather/ in place. He gives Ellen's hand a blank look when she kneels at his side. It takes him a moment to place it, and place the gesture. He sets his hand in hers with a murmured noise that is maybe thanks.
Creed? He is out. Like a big, violent light without his front teeth. Or more accurately, with front teeth starting to regenerate and work their way out of broken gums that are likewise beginning to knit. It's kind of gross, really.
Inside of his head, though, it is a pretty interesting place to poke around. Where normally, the rampage of the wild animal that is his instincts turns the landscape into a gory hell of blood and gore, the stains are only minimal. It is as if someone had cleaned the mess out. Those instincts are slightly more dulled, his carefully constructed controls over them (what of them there are) are weaker for it. It is as if that other telepath were redecorating, but stopped and now it is being undone by time. The fingerprints are /everywhere./
Bowing her head as she closes her fingers over Bahir's hand, Ellen closes her eyes. Her first step as she leaps through the thousands of cells of his body towards the ~affected area~ is to hush the screaming of assaulted nerves while the rest of her work goes to healing the actual damage. The work is delicate. Her focus is intent, her breathing even.
Please don't ruin anything in the ~affected area~, Ellen. As pain fades, Bahir's focus on Creed's mind sharpens. Highlighting one particularly distinct smudge, he circles it. He frowns. He sidesteps to find a blank portion of canvas on which to inscribe a sharp memory, so that Creed will wake with Bahir's voice fading in his ears. With needle, he stitches, "Next time, I really will throw you off a building. Enjoy the tongue. /My/ cat did."
When her work is finished, Ellen releases his hand and pushes herself to her feet in a smooth, gliding motion. She tugs at her shirt, pulling it more properly into place. Aloud she says, "Well."
"Well," Bahir echoes, distracted as he sets a few last stitches neatly into place, knotting and biting off the thread of power. He smoothes things down, reading over the words one last time. Yup. That'll do. Telepathy disengages with one last long eyeball at an Emmaish smudge. He stirs, movement no longer bring quite the level of crushed-ball pain, and breathes faint relief. Again, he says, "Thank you," to Ellen, this time more distinctly. He rises to his feet, and says to her, "If you are still here when he wakes, tell him that was the punchline. Good evening."
"Good evening, Dr. al-Razi," Ellen answers mildly with a slight inclination of her head. She sits down upon a crate again, crossing her ankles and looking quietly contemplative.
Ellen does not understand people.