histrionic heroes

It's been a long time since Cole's thought that any space he occupied wasn't big enough for him and another. Certainly, if a room was big enough for Vandham, it could fit a creaky old cowboy in alongside.

Seeing Zeke jump a mere half a ped to slap the threshold on the way into his office has Cole's fingers itching for his guns. He probably didn't even need to jump. But he did, just to shake the foundations, didn't he?

"Say, Pops - can I call you Pops?"

"No, you can't call me 'Pops', what the hell is wrong with you?"

None cowed by this retort, Zeke nudges Pandy and makes an enormous stage whisper aside that it "sounds like Gramps is missing his daily dose of Bright Figs, eh what?"

It doesn't do Cole any favors, he doesn't think, that Zeke had pretended to ask, first. He seems inclined to just keep rolodexing through variants of the same flippant title as fits the situation, which is...not unadmirable. Addam had had a way with words in terms of public speaking, of articulating himself before the masses, but Zeke, well. Zeke's got jokes.

Cole has to admit, he misses the humor he uses to inflect his scripts with. Always a last catch, a punchline, an audience prod, a stage direction just a scintilla too corny. Tasteful, but wry. Something Hugo would have enjoyed, bits that got Jin to give a short exhalation with disapproving eyes. The same of Brighid, only she was a little more likely to be in on it. (Except when Cole wrote jokes around her, and she never knew.)

So what of Zeke? And Pandy, for that matter?

Maybe he should be a little more open to their somewhat slapstick routine. Maybe.

"So, old-timer," ah, yes, because of course, that's all that much different (and it is, less disrespectful, more overly familiar, so Cole chafes, chafes, chafes), "you got butchered up by the pope too?"

"You call it butchering, then? I thought he saved your life."

"Yeah, but he didn't ask, did he?"

Pandoria's devotion is clear - Amalthus, too, had known that he could perform this procedure without asking and be dubbed a saint for it. Or so he thought.

"I'm..." she looks down at her Core, as if checking to see that the missing piece is still, in fact, missing, "...there's nothing in the world I could ever want more than to be connected to Zeke like this. But it wasn't our choice."

"Yeah." Zeke matches her gaze. "At first, we were both just happy to be alive, and have each other. But the more I talked with Amalthus, the less I liked what he'd done."

Well. Not an unfamiliar sentiment. And delivered seriously, too. Cole has to hand it to them. Butchered, indeed.

"I'd like to say that he never gave me anything, either, so that I don't feel indebted, but he gave me the ability, if not the opportunity, to leave him. So it's poetic, in a way."

"Product of your circumstance, chum. We've all been there."

Before he can stop it, an incredulous look plasters itself upon Cole's face. You? Me? Together? Been there? Pandoria hardly counts as an Only Sane Woman for him to ally with. If only Roc were here, or hell, even Iona.

Where is his darling girl...

"Besides," continues Zeke, baring and bearing his chest with a flourish and a pump, "it's not the prettiest job, now, is it? Looks a little like lightning, sure, but I've got my stretch marks for that."

Cole nods. "But the Core is intact, the skin is healthy. Looks like you should be in good shape for a while yet." As if he's a doctor. As if he's seen any of Amalthus's successful experiments, or any of them, really, since Mikhail.

"So?"

Cole jerks up. Both the wonder twins are gazing expectantly at him. Zeke still hasn't put his great tit away.

"So?" he echoes.

Zeke makes a beckoning gesture. "Let's see yours."

"Wh--" oh, and now he's pinched his neck trying to look down at the thing that he himself most definitely knows is still there, for cripes... "It's right there, you asshole!"

"Yeah, but the scar," Zeke purrs, "since you've got that natty little thing on your face already. C'mon, I wanna see."

"How do you know I've got a scar there?"

The thunderbolt strikes a pose. "Just a lucky guess. You didn't ask why I thought, just how I knew."

No point in arguing with the furious fulmination, is there? And Cole doesn't like to begrudge the kids anything. Yeah, Zeke's a fellow sufferer, and Pandy is too, though she's not busting his nuts about it.

So, out it comes. Breathe in the air, baby.

"Ah, and what have we here?"

"Oh, for the love of-"

"Niiice top surgery, Pops!"