nightingalesong (nightingalesong) wrote in marvel_nextgen,
@ 2009-09-28 00:00:00

Entry tags:

inactive - emily banner, inactive - qamar, team - avengers

Bath time
It's been a long day.

It's clear that something's wrong with SHIELD. And clear that something needs to be done.

Nightingale needs some help. That much is clear. And Qamar is particularly disturbed about Sammy's behavior.

To think he had almost opened up to her... to tell her the real secret about Nightingale. But now... he's sure he'll never be able to. It wouldn't be safe... for either of them.

Assuming she wouldn't have been weirded out anyway.

It's probably better if he keeps the secret anyway, now that he thinks about it. She probably wouldn't understand.

He needs to think. Nightingale will need him later, but for now, he needs to think.

He steps into his apartment's tiny bathtub, filling the water with warm water. He puts on music and strips, sinking down to his nose in the warm water.

Some quiet time will help him focus and think.

_____

This scene takes place before Rallying the Troops.

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emmysmash
2009-09-28 08:20 am UTC (link)

It had been a long, long day. One of the ones that left Emily staggering down to the shop on the corner for more coffee twice as often and breaking her usually healthy diet to get herself more than one slice of apple pie.

She'd arrived at seven am sharp to find a massive filing task waiting for her - new set editions of encyclopedias - in twelve languages - that needed to be entered into the library system. Then her normal load of translation work being interrupted by an emergency special project for a was dark outside her office windows now but there was still a stack of paperwork near as high as her eyebrows in her inbox.

Well, that wasn't that tall a stack she supposed. It would probably seem smaller if she picked her chin up off of her desk.

Yawning and rubbing at her eyes she sat up straighter, stretching out her arms over heard and arching her back until it gave out a few satisfying little pops. Maybe it was time to give her brain a breather and pick up something a little more personal for a half hour or so.

Sliding out of her chair Emily made her way over to the cabinet at the back of her office, pulling out her keys she unlocked the front doors, then the drawere where the kept her favourite and most special of projects. The artifact had been a curiosity when it was handed over to her a few months ago and it was still something that kept her delightfully puzzled when she most needed a little mental exercise. Translation was an arduous task for many but for Emily it was like reading words that might as well have been different colours rather than different languages. Transferring one language to another was fascinating in some ways but terribly routine in others, especially when trading between languages didn't even require a change of alphabet.

The little golden cylinder locked away in her favourite drawer of her favourite cabinet in her favourite part of her office was her own special little challenge for her tired bored mind...

About 9 inches long and an inch and a half around the artifact was for all Emily had been able to tell solid gold right down to the guts. Divided into seventeen slender sections, each engraved with different characters of an ancient formative version of Chinese that she had been slaving over translation of , Emily could spend HOURS just turning each little wheel that made up the tube and seeing what sentences she could form from the hundreds on characters. Most made no sense, untranslated words leaving gaps in her knowledge and the sheer number of combinations making finding anything genuinely meaningful a painstaking process of elimination...

Emily had taken to just spinning the wheels at random and seeing what she came up with before trying any kind of systematic method. It seemed to work better.

Settling back at her desk she stood the cylinder on it's end on the table top, pushing bandadged papercut fingers up beneath her glasses to rub her sore eyes for a moment before she began.

"Ah mon petit trésor. Quel non-sens me direz-vous aujourd'hui?"

Trailing her fingers along the side of the wheels she gave them a firm spin, watching and waiting patiently until she say each one click to a stop.

"Eh? Étrange... Ce regarde grammaticalement correct..."

One breath later Emily's desk chair was no more, and she was up to her neck in the soapy water of someone else's evening bath.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	nightingalesong 2009-09-28 08:25 am UTC (link)
	Qamar reacts quickly to the invader in his bath. He leaps up and twists around, elbowing the woman in the back, trying to push her down and face-first into the water. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

emmysmash
2009-09-28 08:32 am UTC (link)

Emily lets out a yelp of pain and surprise, toppling forward at the blow to her back. Slipping on the slick surface of tub she falls to her hands and knees in the water, cracking her forhead off of the taps and starting to cry as she clutches at her face... then PANIC when she realizes the cylinder is no longer in her hands.

"ARRÊTEZ L'ARRÊT ! Je suis si désolé ! Je veux juste partir ! Sil vous-plait, oh mon dieu, je ne sais pas ce qui s'est produit…

Her voice is all frantic and sobbing and she cowers, keeping her head as low as possible without being in the water, both hands now fishing at the bottom of the tub to try to find her treasured artifact - when she comes up with a handful of broken gold pieces her apologetic tone turns to sheer wordless anguish.

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	nightingalesong 2009-09-28 08:36 am UTC (link)
	Qamar's out of the tub, his posture ready for combat. When he hears the words, however, he grabs a towel and wraps it around his waist, then crouches. "...//Who are you?//" he asks in French, with an Arabic accent. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	emmysmash 2009-09-28 08:46 am UTC (link)
	"Je m'appelle Emily." she sobs, lifting her head to show her now bleeding forhead, crooked fogged glasses she's clearly half-blind without and huge scared brown eyes. //Where am I? I was in my office a second ago I swear...// (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	nightingalesong 2009-09-28 08:49 am UTC (link)
	"//How did you get here?//" he asks. He's crouching to meet her eye-to-eye, but he's still ready to attack her again if the crying turns out to be an act. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

emmysmash
2009-09-28 08:58 am UTC (link)

"//I don't know! I was sitting at my desk and then suddenly I was in your tub!//" she sniffled, then switched to English suddenly to swear florridly as she fished in the water for more of the pieces of the gold cylinder.

"Oh God, it's destroyed! Marice is going to KILL me!" she rubbed at her face, trying to staunch the blood not trailing toward her eyes. "//W-Where is this place? I was in la bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in the archival offices a moment ago, honestly!//"

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	nightingalesong 2009-09-28 09:00 am UTC (link)
	Qamar has been through too much to believe that it's a coincidence that someone just randomly teleported into his bath tub. "//Wait here,//" he tells her. He gathers his clothes and steps out of the bathroom for a moment. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

emmysmash
2009-09-28 09:06 am UTC (link)

Left soaked and bleeding in the tub Emily watches him go out the door, still sniffing and crying.

After a moment she pulls herself to her feet and steps out of the tub, dripping all over the floor as she grabs a towel from over by the sunk and crouches next to said tub, reaching in and beginning to fish out the peices of the shattered cylinder from the soapy water.

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	nightingalesong 2009-09-28 09:09 am UTC (link)
	A moment later, a fully-dressed Qamar returns into the bathroom. "//Let's take care of that head-wound,//" he suggests. He moves to the sink and opens the medicine cabinet, pulling out bandages and gauze. There's a veritable pharmacy of first-aid supplies stuffed into the cabinet, but he shuts it again and moves to investigate. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

emmysmash
2009-09-28 09:19 am UTC (link)

Emily calms considerably when he offers to treat her wounds rather than reacting with anymore violence.

"Thank you." she murmurs when she sees the bandages and gauze pulled out, getting shakily to her feet and sitting herself on the closed lid of the toilet where he can reach her.

For the first time she studies his face a little, calms enough to hear the music in the bathroom. Her breath is coming in wheezing hitches, panic making her asthma act up, but she's slowly calming down...

"//Who are you?//" she asks finally, fisting bony hands in the dripping wet material of her skirt.

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	nightingalesong 2009-09-28 09:39 am UTC (link)
	"//I am Qamar el Sayed,//" he explains, removing her glasses to get a better look at the injury to her face. He soaks a clean washcloth with alcohol and begins cleaning the dripping blood off her face. He can question what she's really doing here once she's bandaged up. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	emmysmash 2009-09-28 07:01 pm UTC (link)
	Emily hisses and tries not to squirm as the alcohol stings the cut on her forehead. Head wounds being what they are she's bleeding alot but the actual cut is small and not really anything to fuss too much about. "//Where are we?//" she asks as he tapes gauze to her forehead. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	nightingalesong 2009-09-28 07:16 pm UTC (link)
	"//My apartment in New York,//" he tells her. "//Your glasses appear damaged. Let me see what I can do.//" He offers her a towel and takes the glasses, moving to the sink where he has space to move -- and watch her in the mirror in case she tries anything. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

emmysmash
2009-09-28 07:24 pm UTC (link)

Emily is loathe to surrender her glasses becuase her up close vision is wretched without them, but she doesn't see herself as having my room to argue with this man after she fell on him in the midst of his bath. He's clearly suspicious and has every right to be, honestly. Best to be cooperative.

"//New York?//" she lets out a strangled little squawk. "//I was in Paris before I got here!//"

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	nightingalesong 2009-09-28 07:27 pm UTC (link)
	"//What were you doing in Paris before you arrived?//" he asks, still working on the glasses. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	emmysmash 2009-09-29 02:43 am UTC (link)
	"//New York? I was BORN in New York...//" Emily wrung a bit of the water out of her skirt, starting to shiver and making a face as she shifted her legs and felt her little ballet slipper shoes squelch messily under the soles of her feet. "//I was working. I'm a translator and archivist at the Sainte-Geneviève library.//" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	nightingalesong 2009-09-29 03:19 am UTC (link)
	"//Not... what I meant. What specifically were you doing that caused you to end up in my bathtub?//" He turns around and provides the glasses. "//There. Good as new.//" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	emmysmash 2009-09-29 07:43 pm UTC (link)
	Emily tucked her glassed back into place, nodding in thanks, and looking over at the towel on the floor by the tub. Getting up again she padded back over and reached into the water again, fishing out another cluster of gold discs. "//I was working on translating the symbols on THIS, but now it's ruined.//" she said mournfully. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	nightingalesong 2009-09-29 07:56 pm UTC (link)
	"//Do you have any idea what it was?//" he asks, taking a closer look at the disks. Some sort of artifact could explain it, after all. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

emmysmash
2009-10-02 05:05 am UTC (link)

"//No idea. I hadn't managed to translate it. The symbols on the rings, it all used to be stacked in a cylinder you see - on top of each other like this.//" Emily picks up two of the peices and lays them on top of each other so that the characters line up, speaking now with the earnest interest of a woman who could go on about a topic for HOURS if you let her.

"//They were all disorganized and it's an ancient dialect of Mandarin so even the parts I could get in order I couldn't read that well. I thought maybe it was a word game for travelling with because the sentences I COULD form were all mentioning paths or roads somehow.//" she sighs expansively. "//It's probably magical isn't it? All the bad things that happen to me start out with magic...//"

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	nightingalesong 2009-10-02 06:05 am UTC (link)
	"//I suppose it's possible.//" And it would explain some things. After all, Nightingale's... sort of magical. Kind of. It could be random chance after all. "//It would make sense if it was a teleportation device of some sort,//" he admits. "//...do you have someone you can call? To help you get home?//" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	emmysmash 2009-10-02 06:37 am UTC (link)
	"//Of course. I'll just contact the other Avengers. I just need to use a phone, please?//" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	nightingalesong 2009-10-02 06:39 am UTC (link)
	"//Of course.//" He pauses. "//...the other Avengers? You are one of the Avengers?//" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	emmysmash 2009-10-02 06:49 am UTC (link)
	Emily hesitates, realizing what she's just said and wincing. "//Er, yes. I-I really just need a phone. I'll call my friend James and he can pick me up.//" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

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nightingalesong, 2009-10-02 07:42 am UTC

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emmysmash, 2009-10-02 07:47 am UTC

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nightingalesong, 2009-10-02 07:49 am UTC

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emmysmash, 2009-10-02 07:56 am UTC

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nightingalesong, 2009-10-02 08:34 am UTC

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emmysmash, 2009-10-02 08:36 am UTC

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