fightthegods:
There’s something in the woman’s tone and attitude that makes Eoin sit up a little bit straighter, like she managed to find a rope in his spine and tightened it with just her words. Narrowed eyes level on her and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat; there isn’t an attitude to drop from where he’s sitting, simply the way he’s always been — or remembers himself being at any rate — and the fact that he’s called out on it makes his nose scrunch a little. Is this why his father had always been so angry with him?
His eyes close tight as flashes of images enter his brain and the smell of burning flesh assaults his nose. Fourteen again, there’s screaming in his ears, his name, despair and horror and pain and pure shock. A shudder visibly runs through his body; when he blinks his eyes open again he’s back in the unassuming Ohio diner, and the woman’s intense gaze is still fixed upon his person.
Eoin lets out a slow breath he hadn’t noticed he’d been holding, and with a single hand, finally gestures at the seat opposite him. Finding his eyes pulling to the staff once more, Eoin reaches back slowly and pulls the hood of his worn and moth-eaten green vest over his head, down towards his forehead. Not so much to conceal his identity rather than to create a safe space in a world where there is none.
“Okay,” he finally mumbles, eyes fixed on the table between them, chewing on his cheek; a habit that has already caused scarring on the inside of them, but something he just can’t keep himself from doing. “What do you want from me, then?”
She wastes no time taking her seat as soon as it’s offered, the handbag placed next to her and the scarf she’d been wearing loosened and folded across her lap. To hide openly in a place was more suspicious than making one’s self at home, after all. There was no pomp nor circumstance and truly she acted as if she had always belonged there; an old friend whom she’d taken the time to regard before finding her seat rather than a tense moment of indecision between two mutants on differing sides of thought.
Gloves still on, she lifts a menu to peruse it, motioning for a waitress and taking the time to order eggs, toast, bacon, and asking then for a jar of hot sauce, and after the woman had scurried off, returning her attention to Eoin.
“I’m not here to blow smoke up your ass, darling.” Minka’s words were not condescending, but merely matter-of-fact; she wasn’t trying to talk down to him or use a pet name to disregard him, but merely because names are powerful things in this day and age and she wasn’t going to openly give anyone else’s to the air, “We’ll always be in danger, no matter what, but there are places that offer us some form of... respite.”
It would have been easy to slide into her own history right then and there — to spill the blood of her life as a buffet for the boy to consume and make a decision on the validity of her statements — but instead, she left the silence hanging for a span of beats perhaps too long for comfort, “I doubt you want to know every detail about me, but if you ask me something I promise to tell you the truth — I’ve no reason to lie and it would do us both no good if I did.”
The plate placed before her was sub-par at best, but she smiled genially and used a triangle of toast to jab the yolk of one of her eggs, playing with it for a moment before biting its end off. The ball was in his court.
