Logs:Decompartmentalized

Decompartmentalized
Dramatis Personae Fury, Lucien
In Absentia	2023-05-07 "If you weren't in some difficulty you wouldn't've dropped by so abruptly."
Location <NYC> Director's Office - S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ - Times Square
This corner office is big, bright and airy, which is not cheap to come by in midtown Manhattan. On one side, a huge glass desk sits in front of the floor-to-ceiling window looking out over Times Square. The far corner has a leather couch, a coffee table, a liquor cabinet and a sideboard, but the rest of the floor space has been left open between eclectically stocked bookshelves. Fury's secretary is not in, and neither for that matter is most of the agency beyond Essential Personnel, but the director himself is hard at work on this Sunday afternoon. Or at least, he had been until recently. The holoprojected screen on his desk is shut off and the laptop closed and pushed aside in favor of a glass tea set that definitely does not see much use. He's wearing a black button-down (no tie) and black jeans under his signature black duster, and is somewhat dubiously eyeing the canister of English Breakfast Tea in his hand. There's a quiet knock at the door, a quiet beep almost immediately after. Lucien, a touch more in keeping with the season in neatly tailored blue jeans and pale blue short-sleeved button-down is just tucking his keycard away as he enters. Though he seems quiet unabashed as he lets himself in it's catching sight of the tea set that gives him pause. His eyes hitch on the glass pot, hand halted on the door and a very faint touch of pink rising to his cheeks; it's faded away again by the time he pushes the door closed and starts toward the desk. "Director Fury." His head inclines, small and polite. "I do apologize for interrupting your Sunday so abruptly -- I don't intend to steal much of your time." "Mister Tessier. I didn't suppose you was stoppin' by for tea, but it is tea time, ain't it?" Fury has not donned his work accent, though he does put down the tea canister. "If I was working on anything I didn't want interrupt I'd've said so, and if you weren't in some difficulty you wouldn't've dropped by so abruptly." He studies Lucien thoughtfully. "Got Scotch, too, if it's that kind of difficulty, but I won't keep you longer than you want, neither." "I brought Jackson coffee." There is the vaguest touch of a disappointment in Lucien's mild voice, here. He fetches up against a chair on the far side of the desk, but does not take it -- just stands with his hands pressed against its back. "Currently it seems to be the puzzle kind. Not the sort I tend to enjoy, either." His tone is light enough; his eyes have strayed toward the liquor cabinet, though only for a moment before he pulls them back to Fury. "I understand that there are quite a very large number of things you cannot tell me, but we have had a bit of --" The hesitation here is so slight many other men would most likely not have caught it at all. "-- peculiarity lately, and. Well, peculiarity is something of your bailiwick here, I thought at the least asking you to keep an eye out might not hurt." "Coffee, huh? You are a good friend." Fury's mouth twists slightly, a moment's indecision before he picks the tea back up. "Aight, let me give this joint a try." He very carefully spoons the tea leaves into the brewing basket as though carrying out some delicate chemical experiment. "You ain't wrong. I can't make no promises, but what's the peculiarity?" The singular eye he presumably keeps out for peculiarities flicks up to his guest. "And who's the 'we' havin' it? I'mma take a wild guess it includes Mister Holland." "He has baked me many pies over the years. It seems only fair." Lucien gives the tea -- and then Fury -- a long and serious look. "You seem a capable man. I have faith you can work it out." And then, just as serious and quite undermining this assertion: "You add hot water." He taps a finger, slow, against the chair where it rests. "Regrettably, and somewhat incidentally, I suppose it does. His son is missing." There is a beat, Lucien still watching Fury's endeavors with a kind of curious fascination. "And my brother. Several of their classmates, as well. It might not have been so very odd, some teenagers traipsing off together, but they vanished shortly after my mother turned up to sign Gaétan out of school." The uptick of Fury's eye this time is distinctly unimpressed. "'Preciate the tip. My gran, God rest her soul, done taught me that much, even if what she was adding it to was twenty Lipton tea bags and a truckload'a sugar." He picks up the electric kettle -- one with specific temperature settings for different kinds of tea -- and fills the teapot, still with more delicacy than is really necessary, though not to such a comical degree as before. He starts a timer on his phone and leans back in his chair. "Your mother," he echoes, not a question. "I take it she hasn't shown any signs of being alive in the interim. And your brother was aware she was dead." He strokes his beard unironically in thought. "That surely is a puzzle. What about the other kids? They all got signed out by your late mother?" "I believe somewhere in the past seven years he had noticed." Lucien gives a small hum of negation at the final question. "Just Gaétan. The others vanished shortly thereafter, inconveniently soon after an EMP shorted all the power in the vicinity, including all their phones or any cameras that might have indicated what led up to the disappearances. Most were his friends, though, and Spencer Holland had indicated to my sister that he intended to look for Gaétan. Given his particular ability, that narrows possible locations down to, ah --" Lucien turns one hand upward. "I realize my family is developing something of a tendency at this point but there is a missing piece no matter what wild conjecture I come up with. Shapeshifter? Another extradimensional doppelganger? Alien clone? I thought perhaps if once again something truly strange --" Lucien's lips compress, his hand dropping back to the seat. "But why he would go with her is another question entirely." "We looked into that EMP, and its somewhat unusual side effects." Fury sounds very casual about this, all things considered. "Didn't get nowhere. None of our investigations around that school ever do, one reason or another. If you put in a word for me, though, I'm happy to send my people to look into the disappearances on that end, real discreet." He steeples his fingers, glancing at the tea in the glass pot. "Absent other information, I freely chalk any inexplicable behavior up to some kind of mind control or other, which could also explain the Holland kid not jumping back from wherever they all gone." He leans forward and braces his elbows on the desk, regarding Lucien steadily. "You and your brother -- the one ain't missing -- both got powerful enemies. His surely got the means, but I don't see a motive, besides which they'd have to be real fucking stupid to grab Jackson Holland's son." His lips compress. "Again. But yours, I'm less clear about. You piss any of them off in particular, lately?" "They are a bit clannish, up there, I am uncertain how much they would accept my vouch. My brother's, perhaps. Ah, the one who -- is not missing." Lucien's brows crease faintly in thought, his eyes following Fury's towards the teapot. "Aside from the usual crowd of armchair Twitter critics, I have regrettably been too busy of late between the stage and L'Entente to incur anyone's wrath. Though," it's aggressively mild, here, "I expect I might find a few spare moments, once we find Gaétan." He straightens, both his hands turning slightly up, slightly out -- towards Fury and the tea both. "I do appreciate your offer." The twitch at the corner of his mouth is fleeting; only the most token nod towards what might in some other time have been a smile; today, decisively not. "-- and the tea. I've missed quite a few cups this past week." "I got a feeling he ain't too fond of me, but even if he was, I don't see as he knows me well enough to give that vouch. I sure wouldn't, in his shoes." Is that disappointment in Fury's voice? It's hard to tell. His expression certainly hasn't changed. "Your hotel has got some colorful clientele, but I s'pose it ain't really been around long enough to get caught up in any wars just yet." He silences the alarm on his phone the moment it starts going off and gingerly pours the tea into the glass mugs he'd had waiting. "Tomorrow I'll get my data mining folks to put in some extra parameters about a pack of missing teenagers, have the EM anomaly team review that EMP data, and I'll keep an eye out myself, too. But for now?" He indicates Lucien's cup with a tip of his hand even as he shifts the sugar bowl and creamer over. "You tell me how you like this here leaf water. If it ain't good, well -- I reckon a truckload'a sugar'll fix that up right quick."