maskormenacelogs | [open] And the nights, they last forever...

Allison's face might freeze in the expression she's giving him, ludicrous and withering. When his words are a ludicrously petulant goad of an insult, to try and get her to play along by insulting her skills and her life choices, she can't even take seriously because the proof is so recent and evident it's just

Please. Only one of us here managed to sneak into and out of three different residences owned by Harold Jenkins. Without breaking anything. One while he was in it even. I'll give you a clue. It wasn't you. And your magical unlocked door attack skills.

That's right. She'll just leave that there. Let it sink for a beat, and send next.

If we're even considering this, we're going around to the back. Not announcing it to everyone walking and driving by on the street.

Edited 2019-05-26 23:00 (UTC)

He just laughs, head pitched forward a bit, more amused by the snappy comments his sister throws his way than he thinks he's been by anything since he got here. Some things are consistent, no matter what universe they end up in. He throws one hand up and shrugs, "Okay, I'll admit, not my brightest shining moment."

He snorts and throws a, "Duh," her way before he hops off the front steps and walks around toward the back of the house with her.

Allison gives a roll of her eyes, and a there's an overdone sigh out of her nose. Except that no sound comes with it. There's no vibration to even give it force, only the vaguery of friction, with it's continued and constant pinch of frustration blurring itself into every part of her waking life. Reminding her what she can't. What she isn't. But she does at least follow him, around the back, with an eye for anything that looks like cameras or signs anyone's been here in a while.

It's not like she's exactly looked to see what the laws look like here. Not that she'd cared at home. But still.

Once they get to the back, he starts checking the obvious things-- to see if any windows happened to be left unlocked. No such luck. He fumbled around for pockets the pants he's currently wearing don't actually have before looking back over at Allison. "You got a credit card or bobby pins?" Two of the easiest on-hand lock picking pieces someone might generally have on their person. It's amazing the skills you learn to do as a born-raised-and-bred vigilante.

The look she saddles Diego with would be a line of words if she could speak. Something along the lines of Do you ever actually pay attention? But even thinking about writing it down and then sending it takes some of the fire and desire, both, out of it. Leaves it a lump of coal, irritating, under her skin, as she half-rolls her eyes again and walks a little faster for the door, getting to it partially in front of him.

She did point out she'd been doing just this, flawlessly,
on no notice, and no need for those skills lately, not long ago.

Allison does pull out two bobby pins, bending part of the first one at a 90 degree already, even before she brings the other side to her mouth, scraping off rubber end with her teeth in a deft movement. Spitting it out the next second, without any expression or thought to it. Only shifting to lean down, getting closer, and starting to work with complete focus. Gaze glazing, even at sharply focused, on the most minute sensations along the metal.

Deft fingers not even tapping a pin without sliding it up right after. It's not even a full thirty seconds before Allison feels the last one go and tests a twist of the knob with her few free fingers. It turns entirely in silent defeat and Allison tips her head just enough to smile blithely at her brother.

Edited 2019-05-29 02:06 (UTC)

He throws both hands up like in surrender and steps aside to let her work with the bobby pins. There's an amused smirk on his face the entire time as she prepares and picks the lock.

"Far be it from me to get in the way of a lady who can handle the job all on her own." He snickers and finally drops his hands and, as he moves to step inside the house, he sticks his tongue out at her. Like the absolutely mature adult that he is.

Permanent eye roll if going to be the default expression of her next half hour, isn't it? Allison doesn't even stop the urge while her brother worms past her and into the house, without also waiting to see if there's an alarm. But why would he, when slamming through windows seemed a good entrance enough for him.

There at least doesn't seem to be, and Allison tucked the used bobby pins in her pants pocket while standing and followed him in. A last look to make sure no one had seen them, and closed the back door behind them, before turning her focus to the house itself.

All show ready still like its photos, and there's a strange déjà vu settling between her shoulder blades. She never thought she'd be house shopping for the third time. (She never thought she'd need a second either.) The wonder about whether Diego even had a clue what he was looking for in here, and what to look for in a house, and just ... the cold reminder, again, she knew nothing about where her brother had lived or what he'd done in the last more than a decade.

It could have been anything.

Diego figures if he's going to get caught for breaking and entering, he may as well do the entering part of the crime. Or he just has no patience. One of those.

He glances around the room and starts to move through the house, assessing things. It looks the same as the pictures, but there's nothing quite the same as actually, physically seeing it all. He comes to a pause in the living room and holds up both hands, making a square with his hands, "Gonna need a bigger tv." he drops his hands and looks over at Allison with a ridiculous grin. "Seriously, though. Looks good, right?" And if that seems more like a real question than something rhetorical, he'll never admit it.

It's large. Not as large as the place they all grew up, but still larger already, just on the downstairs floors, than either of the two places Allison had been thinking of. There's no absolution that says that they actually need this much space, but it wasn't like there were basic housing pieces over in the original allocations for seven (and Allison had already known she wouldn't reduce the room number even if it had just been herself and one other person).

Diego play acting toward the tv made her come back from letting her eyes trail the walls and doorways in the walkway outside of the room he'd walked in to do just that. She settled with a speculative look.

You do know the furniture probably doesn't come with it, unless we want to double or triple the price, depending, right?

"That's stupid." The words roll out of his mouth before he even thinks about it at all, an expression on his face to match. He shakes his head, "Whatever. All the more reason for a bigger tv."

He shrugs and wanders toward the stairs, taking them two at a time to investigate the bedrooms and whatever else is upstairs.

Her brother is an idiot and a child, but that's really not new, isn't it? Allison resists from the comment only because her mouth doesn't work and writing things that would just be ignominiously ignored anyway gets tedious at times.

She doesn't take the stairs as fast as Diego -- not that she couldn't, even in these heels -- but she is still curious. Tries to picture the seven of them there. Walking the stairs, in these hallways, in the rooms she pauses to look into with their plastic, perfect setups. She doesn't even quite know what to picture. Even back in the Academy, it'd been more like they fell back into awkwardly disjointed players in the shadows of who they used to be.

Ending up back in the same never-changed bedrooms, and same never-changed breakfast table, and couches and chairs in the same never-changed living room and office; half who they used to be, and half the person they'd become when they'd rejected entirely who that first person had been and wasn't supposed to need to become more than.

Diego isn't being nearly as reminiscent as Allison as he moves through the hallways and bedrooms upstairs, taking in the layout of each one in turn.

The idea of all of them in one place is still so weird and wild to consider, if he's honest. The week of doom back home aside, it's been years since that was something that even made any kind of sense. Diego had rarely even seen any of his siblings in the twelve or so years since he first left the Academy. He hadn't had a roommate once during that time at all, so it will certainly be an adjustment at any rate.

"I call dibs." he says, standing in the doorway of one of the rooms, arms spread, the air about him absolutely of someone who's just already decided and is refusing to leave room for arguments.

Allison doesn't roll her eyes, but she doesn't really pay attention to Diego either, except to notice the room over his shoulder is a little larger than the other two, three she'd passed by. And she does that with him, too. Passes by. Keeps looking through the doorways at the bedrooms. All of them are sizable. Not entirely the same shapes, but none of them are postage stamp small. No one will be relegated to a closet.

All of these rooms are bigger than the small spaces they grew up in, and had moved back into while they were back home for that week and half. It's so weird to remember, each time she does, that the house is gone. She doesn't care about it as much as she thought she might at anytime considering it before. But it's strange. Discordant. To think about it obliterated. The site of so much that happened. So much they'd done. (So much that had been done to them.)

Diego hangs around checking out the room he'd decided to claim for another moment or two, but eventually, he wandered back out in the hallway. "Find one you want, Allison?"

The look Allison gives him says she hadn't really come thinking about that, and it's itself a commentary on Diego's priorities. I'll wait for them to decide if we can officially request it, and manage paying for it, and being accepted for a bid. We don't even know if other people have already put in for it.

There's a gesture toward the stairs as she followed that up with. I want to see the kitchen.

What-ever, Allison! Some people have pri-or-i-ties, okay? Let him live. He just pulls a face at her oh-so-practical remark before swinging his way out of the doorway and follows her toward the stairs.

"Fine, fine. We'll be practical, I guess." He still shoots her a little smirk with the words.

One of us has to.

It's impossible to tell, entirely devoid of sound, except the tapping and tacking the stairs as she walked back down them, and with him behind her back before it, without expression or addition to it, following if that was a dig at it meaning of the two of them. Or the seven of them.

The kitchen is wide open and airy, light streaming in, more things all set across it to make it look picturesque and expensive, but what Allison stares at it thinking about is the disparity of a dining room table with all of them at it again. It's a strange thought. There's enough room, of course. But that hadn't happened even when they were all home for the week. Not really. Not even once, with all of them coming and going at different times whole the world counted down to ending.

Diego certainly took that remark to mean between the two of them, as he was being absolutely beyond ridiculous about this whole ordeal. An absolute giddy child, by all counts, really. But he was hardly bothered by any of her judgment as he followed her down the stairs, taking two at a time and wandering just behind her into the very spacious kitchen.

"You know, I think this kitchen is bigger than the last apartment I lived in." But then, almost everything was bigger than the last apartment he lived in, because that was a boiler room in the gym he worked out. But details like that were irrelevant as he goes to investigate cabinet space-- because that seems like a reasonable thing to do when you were looking at a kitchen, right? "Do any of these appliances stick around, or is all just for show?" he glances back over his shoulder at Allison, curious. Apartments tended to come with a small handful of things, but he'd never bought a house. Maybe the rules were different somehow.

Allison still has to look back at that comment before taking the room in at that parallel. Tying it to that mention of Diego living in a gym, and what did that even look like? Allison couldn't even picture much of how one would go about living in a gym, itself. But space gave it some context. An oddly awkward one, as somewhere in her head she tried to even think about the last time she'd lived in a space so much smaller than any of her last several.

Diego follows it all up, just the next second with another question, giving Allison something else to answer instead of that strange, uncertain give of comparison and she looks at what is in the room. Maybe? There's a bit of a shrug at the first fast send before she adds more. It'll be in the paperwork, but a lot of rentals at least come with the basics. The fridge and stove probably.

We'll need to ask about the washer and dryer, too.

Edited 2019-06-23 02:04 (UTC)

He shuts the cabinet he was poking around inside of and considers her answer to that for a second. "Uh- I really hope they give us the washer and dryer, because laundromats suck." Not to mention, they were freaking expensive. The more this conversation winds around, though, the more he's realizing how very, very little about each other's lives any of them are aware of, really. Except maybe Ben and Klaus-- Ben got the short end of the stick, on that one, and had no choice in the tag-along game with him.

"Have you ever even been to one?" The question isn't the jab it could have been, taken a little too much by that seconds-earlier realization so that the words are more curious than insulting. "Fuck, seven of us... I don't even wanna think what that's gonna cost a month on laundry alone."

The thing is, she hasn't.

At least not outside of the context of a movie set.

It doesn't change that she doesn't need someone to explain what they are like.

It's only that she'd never needed one when she was young enough she could have. (I heard a rumor that you did my laundry with yours. I heard a rumor you did all the laundry, because it's your apartment chore. Because you love it. Because I'm your best friend. I heard a rumor. I heard a rumor. I heard a rumor.) Then, by the time she was doing her own laundry, again -- finally? -- she had enough money to buy her next place with her own washer and dryer already in it, and even to send it all out for dry cleaning, with folding and home delivery, if she didn't want to do it still.

Expensive. Just like the electricity.

The rest of water bill, too.
Showers. Cooking. Dishes. Etc.

Edited 2019-06-26 01:45 (UTC)

"I'm not a fan of the numbers those things are going to look like." He almost visibly winces at the thought of it. And that isn't even considering what having all of them, or in whatever variety of them that end up here completely, living together. Personalities connecting and, honestly probably more to the point, clashing in so many overlapping ways, too. The interpersonal ways of roommates and existing in the same space together and everything that comes with that.

"We're gonna kill each other before we hit two months in this place." The words have the air of a joke to them, but there's still such a very possible reality to it still, too.

I'll work on not smothering you in your sleep on night one so you can make it that long.

The retort is all too easy, especially when there's no fire or anger behind it. Which doesn't stop her from affording him a cooly promising look with it. They were well enough aware of who they were, and how well they did -- and did not -- get along in the long term, where it came to agreeing on a great many things, and at least one half anything with Luther's name, or presence, taking place in it.

It's not serious, even when it is.

Like this planet, there's no other good option.
We'll figure it out. Money first, bodies later.

It sends, and then something actually serious follows the first two, as she looks at the room, and out the windows in the kitchen, letting so much light in, and back through that huge archway between the kitchen back to the living room. It's not terrible, right? We could do worse?

Edited 2019-07-01 20:17 (UTC)

"Hey, they first step is admitting you have a problem," he smirks. "And apparently the second step is smothering the problem in their sleep. Thanks." He rolls his eyes. Sometimes, she's just such a sister.

He nods a little. "Yeah... money first," he huffs out a soft sigh of agreement, there.

But then she's not even really looking at him. Back turned, taking in everything in the room. Taking in the house as a whole. There's this giant swell of-- he doesn't know what it is, self-doubt? Apprehension, maybe? Something else he can't name-- standing in the room between them when she asks those questions. And Diego can't help the soft way those words make his face twist, push his steps to be only directly behind her, so close he's almost got his chin on her shoulder as he follows her gaze out the giant archway from the kitchen. "You picked good, sis. We'll get the house... everything else'll play in hand later."

As much as he doesn't want to set up a real camp here, get complacent here, the only thing that's made sense about being here so far is sticking closely to his family. And having a place they could all be, knew they would all be welcome at any time, always, was a good thing if they were going to have to ride out this weird prison sentence against their will anyway.

Allison stiffens, with a bone-deep jerk to one side, as quickly as realizing Deigo's voice is right behind her, beside her ear. It's unexpected in the extreme and while she looks a little apologetic for the alarm, it's, also, just faster-ingrained, tightened expression, impulse to look for the reason of being snuck up on by Diego of all people. Having not the slightest clue why he did it. What for. Though he's been acting like he was twelve from pretty much the second she said where she was coming and making it in has only made that even more so.

Apparently, even to whatever that was. Yeah.

We should probably go.

Mitigate the chance of running into anyone looking in on the house or still working on fix-ups while they are showing it.

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deadlycurves - 2019-07-08 00:19 (UTC) - Expand